James in Turkey

Here we go again

2011-10-23T17:04:00.001+03:00

In the last three hours, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the eastern Turkish province of Van. The first images from towns in the area show plenty of destruction: buildings in rubble, parked cars crushed under falling debris, residents shifting bricks and mortar to reach those trapped beneath. There are reports of student housing collapsed in the town of Erciş.

To most Turks, these images - and Turkish television's coverage - are chillingly familiar. Communications are severely disrupted by the sheer number of trying to contact loved ones, which makes it difficult to build a picture of the damage. No fatalities are yet confirmed but lives will have certainly be lost: shoddy construction techniques will have ensured that. It feels exactly like that fateful night of Tuesday 17 August 1999. At least 20 thousand people died in that earthquake.

But there are differences between then and now. The Turkish Red Crescent's response has been swift, with thousands of tents and supplies of drinking water despatched immediately to Van. Appeals have been launched through the media for local businessmen with diggers and other heavy machinery to come forward, and for ordinary citizens to keep the roads clear by not driving themselves to the earthquake zone to see if they can help. This "disaster tourism" was a major obstacle to relief efforts after the 17 August quake struck.

Turkish building methods, once again, have a lot to answer for, but at least disaster-relief lessons appear to be learnt.

Printing the explicit photo of a woman stabbed by her husband was the right thing to do. Sadly, it didn't work.

2011-10-13T21:26:00.003+03:00

The woman is topless, lying face down on a hospital bed. Out of her back, a little above her waist, protrudes the wooden handle of a large knife. Only a small part of the blade is visible; the rest is buried deep into her abdomen. There is remarkably little blood, but the photograph is no less horrifying. It's a harrowing sight.

It appeared on the front page of last Friday's Habertürk, one of Turkey's most popular newspapers, intended to raise awareness of domestic violence in the family. The woman in the photograph, who later died, was beaten regularly by her husband.

A carefully-chosen, striking photograph in a mass-circulation newspaper can sometimes do in a day what a well-organised pressure group can't in a year: it can whip up public anger, steal the agenda and force someone somewhere to start changing a law.

This photograph, which you can see for yourself by clicking the link at the bottom of this post, is certainly shocking enough to do that. But it didn't work: a week has gone by since that edition of Haberturk went to press, and yet more Turks appear angry at at the editor for printing the photograph than at the husband for wielding the knife.

Women's rights groups gathered outside Habertürk's offices to protest on Sunday demanding a withdrawal and apology from Fatih Altaylı, the paper's editor. Think of the children who saw it in all its lurid detail, they said. Mediz, a media monitor for women's rights, called the photograph "the ultimate stage in pornography" (referencing Habertürk's headline, "the ultimate stage in violence towards women") and said the newspaper had become a perpetrator of the violence by publishing it. Even Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister, disagreed with the decision.

But Mr Altaylı has been bullish. "I would have printed this even if it was a photograph of my own mother. In fact, I would have enlarged it," he wrote in an editorial on Saturday. "I printed it so that my 11-year-old daughter could see, at her young age, the violence that a male-dominated society inflicts on women. I printed it so she could learn to reproach those who remain silent." An article in the Wall Street Journal has him go further:

Mr. Altayli described women's-rights organizations that protested outside the newspaper's offices Sunday as "idiots" who knew nothing about "real life" and what it took to make the government act. "I knew people would criticize me, that they would say I was cruel, but someone had to do it," he said in an interview on Tuesday. "Another six women have been killed since her."

The figures given by the Wall Street Journal are chilling enough: 42 percent of Turkish women say they have suffered physical or sexual abuse from their partner. Nearly half of those victims didn't tell a soul what happened; an astonishing 92 percent didn't seek what little help the authorities can give. Şefika Etik, the victim in the Habertürk photograph, was one of the rare few who actually took refuge at a safe house before her husband came calling a reconciliation. He had a bunch of flowers, Habertürk reports, and was extremely sorry. Within an hour of her return home, the knives came out.

This photograph was printed to horrify and provoke, and it succeeded on both counts. The anger at Mr Altaylı has been palpable. Journalists from Habertürk and rival papers alike have written to criticise the decision to publish. One commentator writing in Bugün, a centre-right daily, questioned Mr Altaylı's apparent conversion to feminism by trawling through some of his earlier journalism, which includes some unflattering stories about a long-distance runner who had an affair with her personal trainer.

But however sinister Mr Altaylı's motives may or may not be, and even if he only wants to sell more newspapers, he has brought prominence to a shameful truth about the place of women in Turkish society. In too many marriages Turkish women are "bequeathed" into the moral ownership of their husbands. Mr Erdoğan's government has shied away from daycare projects to help mothers back into work, abolished a cabinet portfolio for women's rights in favour a Ministry for Families, and frequently calls for newlyweds to aim for "at least" three children. These policies reflect a deeply conservative strain in Turkish society that promotes the family unit over the individual; Mr Altaylı's critics, many of them liberal-minded, are guilty of pretending that strain doesn't exist.

Click here, with caution, to see the Habertürk front page for Friday 7 October 2011

Election 2007: timetable of events

2011-06-12T11:31:00.000+03:00

Following on from yesterday's missive, a quick guide for when to expect what in Turkey's election today. Let's hope for a few surprises.

7am - voting begins in 32 eastern provinces, 8am in the west.

4pm - voting closes in the east, 5pm everywhere else. Counting begins soon after the queuing remainders have voted.

6pm - first results start trickling in to newswires and Twitter. Turkish TV wringing its hands showing lifestyle programming: no-one is allowed to report the results until the Electoral Commission lifts its election news ban.

Midnight - Scheduled end of Electoral Commission's ban on TV results coverage, allowing ample time to make sure every ballot box in the country is safely tucked away.

6.50pm - Around now, Turkish TV loses patience and switches to live coverage of Electoral Commission's front door. Reporters shout for permission to read out results that anyone with an internet connection has already seen.

7pm - Electoral Commission spontaneously announces every ballot box has been found, no-one is still voting in a remote village, and acquiesces: TV results coverage permitted.

7.01pm - Explosion of results. More than a quarter of all votes should have been counted by now; most will be from eastern provinces, where voting finished earlier. AK dominate in the northeast, so will have won most of the seats so far. The fate of the BDP independents should be clearer too. Watch out for Leyla Zana in Diyarbakır.

7.45pm - First substantial results from the west by now. If vote counting is as fast as it was in 2007, the networks should be calling the election for AK around now too. The size of their majority will depend on whether MHP has crossed the threshold.

8.30pm - Vote share for all three main parties should be roughly clear by now, unless the MHP really is on a knife-edge.

10pm - Final colour of Istanbul's 85 seats should be clear by now.

Golden Numbers of Election Night

2011-06-11T00:30:00.002+03:00

Alas, James in Turkey will shirking its good name for this Sunday's election. The bright lights of other events around the same time have been enough a distraction to prevent travel to Turkey, or even to cover the vote from afar. Selections from this blog's coverage for the last time the country did this is still available, though.

By way of recompense for the radio silence around this election, however, allow me to offer the Golden Numbers of Election Night. This is your indispensable guide to the numbers to watch out for as the votes are counted, categorised by political party:

AK Party
Justice and Development Party, religious conservative, governing
276 - absolute majority: the number of seats AK need to govern alone for a third term.
330 - the number of seats needed to change the Turkish constitution, pending approval in a referendum
367 - supermajority: the number of seats needed to change the Turkish constitution without a referendum

CHP
Republican People's Party, centre-left, main opposition
21% - CHP's share of the national vote in 2007's general election
23% - CHP's share of the national vote in 2009's local elections
Anything above 25% would represent a significant improvement on CHP's previous performance, which had exploited a saturated secularist constituency.
Anything above 30% would be an excellent result, a victory for leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, and possibly enough to prevent AK receiving an absolute majority.

MHP
Nationalist Action Party, right wing, opposition
10% - the national share of the vote MHP must cross to win any seats. Stay above, and they could win as many as 70 seats. Fall below, and even provinces the MHP is projected to win - like Mersin and Osmaniye - are likely to fall to AK, possibly helping the governing party towards a supermajority.

BDP
Peace and Democracy Party, pro-Kurdish, candidates running as independents
20 - the minimum number of seats required to form a group in parliament, receive additional funding, and be represented in parliamentary select committees
21 - the number of seats won by pro-Kurdish candidates at the last election
30 - the highest number of seats pro-Kurdish candidates could realistically win in this election, making them kingmakers in a parliament where AK falls short of one of its majorities

Erbakan: a leader who offered something new, and didn't deliver

2011-02-27T21:16:00.001+02:00

Necmettin Erbakan, former Turkish prime minister, leader of the "national outlook" branch of politics and convicted money launderer, died of heart failure today at Ankara's Güven hospital. He was 84, and had been in poor health for a number of years. He served just under a year as prime minister before being forced to resign in the "post-modern" coup of 1997, but his impact on the political scene was far longer than the time he spent at the top.

There are two things he will be remembered for: the political ideology he founded, and the manner of his departure as prime minister. He ought really to be remembered for a third - embezzlement of party funds - but probably won't be.

His political ideology, founded in 1969, was based partly on anti-Western values and the principle of economic self-sufficiency for Turkey. It was named Milli Görüş ("national outlook"), a confusing name seeing as it advocated Turkish independence in the context of political Islam. It was this that attracted such a broad spectrum to Erbakan's following, from the observant villager to the pious cleric.

That said, his movement was not immediately successful, and the Turkish people elected him prime minister only after they had tried everyone else. His National Salvation Party hopped between left and right-wing governments as a junior coalition partner throughout the 1970s, and he was one of the four main party leaders arrested and banned from politics by the army after the 1980 coup, but it wasn't until 1991 that his party won more than 15 percent of the vote and he moved from the fringe to the centre stage.

The Nineties were a fractious time in Turkish politics, with inconlusive elections and unstable coalitions. Part of the problem was a derth of political talent: the generation that should have emerged during the Eighties had been stifled by the generals. That meant that those leading politicians of the left and right, Bülent Ecevit and Süleyman Demirel, came back to ply their trade just as they had done before the coup unseated them.

But everything in Turkey had changed since they were last in power, and politics had descended into a brawl. Mr Demirel's traditional centre-right voting base was occupied by a rival party concerned mostly with distinguishing itself from him. Ecevit faced a similar opponent. And this at a time when private television was showing new programmes and new ideas, the free market economy was bringing greater choice and competition (but plenty of opportunities for shady deals), and Kurdish separatism was on a crescendo. In all this hysteria, Erbakan preached stability, a return to religious values and, most importantly of all, something new.

It worked. To the alarm of the secular elite, he topped the December 1995 general election with more than 6 million votes, a 21 percent share. It was far from enough to govern alone, however, and the centre-right parties concluded a shabby truce to keep him out of power. It wasn't to last, however, and by June 1996 Necmettin Erbakan became prime minister and Turkey's most powerful Islamist since the last sultan. He was backed up by one of those bickering centre-right parties, True Path (DYP) under Tansu Çiller, on the understanding that the top job would be rotated to her after two years.

Erbakan's premiership was everything the secularists feared it would be. Turkey turned definitively east: after brokering an oil pipeline deal with Iran, he made a much publicised visit to Libya, where he signed an agreement of friendship with Muammar Gadafi, and branded the United States and Israel "agents of terror" in the process. At home, in scenes that have never been replicated under today's AK government, Erbakan's Welfare Party (RP) organised rallies in towns after Friday prayers which descended into demonstrations calling for sharia law.

The army's patience wore thin. On 4 February 1997, it sent 20 tanks through the high street in Ankara's Sincan suburb, where a number of pious RP festivals had been held, in a barely-veiled show of force. It followed this with a series of demands to curb fundamentalism during a nine-hour meeting with the government on the 28th. The public prosecutor then launched a case against the RP on anti-secularism charges. The coalition managed to cling on until June, but lost its governing majority through resignations from both RP and DYP. Erbakan resigned on 19 June, fully expecting Mrs Çiller to be asked to form the next government under his coalition deal with her. She wasn't. Necmettin Erbakan was never in government again, his RP was shut down the following year, and he was handed a five-year ban from politics.

From there, it all went downhill. Erbakan played puppermaster to the RP's successor, the Virtue Party (FP), as the Turkish electorate began to turn away from Milli Görüş. The 1999 election saw the FP slip into third place, shedding a million votes. Ecevit topped the poll, but the real victor was the second-placed Nationalist Action Party (MHP), catapulted into parliament for the first time in twenty years. Again, the Turkish electorate was trying something new.

Erbakan the puppetmaster resisted calls for change after that election. He worked hard behind the scenes to stop the FP's reformist wing, under Abdullah Gül, from winning a leadership election in 2000. When the FP too was shut down the following year, it was succeeded not by one party but two. The traditionalists, under Erbakan's watchful eye, launched the Felicity Party (SP), The reformists formed the Justice and Development Party (AK), which broadened into a coalition of the religious, the business-friendly and the liberal. It really was the "something new" the Turkish electorate was looking for, and in 2002 became Turkey's first single-party government for fifteen years. Erbakan's SP, meanwhile, crashed out of parliament and never returned.

What is more, in the last decade Erbakan was able to add a non-political conviction to his name. The notorious "missing trillions" case relates to substantial sums of public money that mysteriously disappeared from the coffers of the Welfare Party before it was shut down. Erbakan was handed a prison sentence and ordered to repay 12.5 million in Turkish Lira. The sentence was commuted to house arrest on the grounds of his ill health, and he was pardoned in 2008 by his former protege, now President Abdullah Gül on the back of medical reports that he did not have long to live. He was well enough to reassume leadership of the Felicity Party, however.

As for the money, the 12.5 million was reduced to 1 million lira under the government's recent amnesty law. In reality it is unlikely even that will be repaid.

For all the polite tributes that politicians have been paying today, Erbakan's time in office was a disaster. He ostracised Turkey from Europe and the United States, provoked the country's fourth military intervention in as many decades, and failed to stem the chronic inflation affecting those Turks who voted him in looking for something new. The public fell out of love with Milli Görüş when it failed to adapt to their needs; it is now little more than a fringe movement. His funeral on Tuesday will surely draw some crowds, but he won't be remembered fondly for much longer.

Necmettin Erbakan, former Turkish prime minister. Born 29 October 1926, died 27 February 2011.

MHP crashes below threshold in opinion poll, but result is really a CHP victory

2011-02-20T13:20:00.000+02:00

Just two parties are likely to cross the 10 percent threshold at the next Turkish election, according to the latest Haberturk/Konsensüs opinion poll. The results, which paint a dangerous picture for voter representation in Turkey, suggest the right-wing Nationalist Action Party (MHP) has the support of only 8.5 percent of voters, which would be the party's worst showing at a general election for nine years.

Just under a quarter of respondents were undecided, said would spoil their ballot or declined to answer the question. Here was what Konsensüs found, with the undecided vote shared among the parties and changes from the previous month's survey in brackets:

AK Party: 49.6 (+3.6) [Justice and Development Party, governing, religious conservative]
CHP: 26.8 (+0.3) [Republican People's Party, secularist]
MHP: 11.1 (-1.4) [Nationalist Action Party, nationalist]
BDP: 6.9 (+0.2) [Peace and Democracy Party, pro-Kurdish]
SP: 0.8 (-2.4) [Felicity Party, strongly Islamist]
Others: 5.6 (+0.5)

AK Party sources were delighted: this poll appears to confirm that their oft-repeated target of a 50% is quite attainable. Press coverage has also focused much on the fate of the MHP, which falls foul of the electoral threshold before the undecideds are shared out. It confirms fears that the dwindling support of the nationalists means that they have a real battle on their hands to ensure they actually make it into the chamber.

But press coverage of the results seems to have overlooked the support of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP). Take a look at my estimated calculations of what parliament would look like (based, as ever, on my calculations**, and with changes from the 2007 election result):

AK Party: 301 (-40)
CHP: 162 (+50)
MHP: 67 (-4)
BDP: 20 seats (no change)
Total: 550 seats

These results would give AK a majority to govern alone - just. But they would also give the CHP their best results since 2002, but this time in a parliament of three parties, not two. This parliament would have a much stronger opposition, despite the rise in AK's share of the vote. It would be an excellent result for Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, CHP leader.

A few other observations from this opinion poll:

Voters appear to be flocking towards the larger parties. Fewer people said they will vote for the far-right BBP or the fundamentalist SP. This trend suggests Turkish voters are increasingly aware fringe parties are unlikely to be represented in parliament.
Konsensüs posed a number of "problems" in Turkish current affairs and asked which party was best-placed to solve them. The AK Party, unsurprisingly, led in them all, but it was interesting that just a few percentage points separated them from the CHP when asked which party was best placed to solve "inequalities in income distribution". A sign that the CHP's return to social democratic roots might be taking hold?
Most importantly, this poll was conducted well over a month before the election campaign kicks off. There's plenty that can change between now and 12 June.

* Konsensüs interviewed 1500 people by telephone across Turkey between 2 and 10 February 2011.
** This is a crude and entirely unscientific swing, assuming the 10 percent electoral threshold is not lowered and the pro-Kurdish BDP's 20 MPs decide to run again as independents.

This man is going home, but watch what he does next

2011-02-18T22:41:00.008+02:00

Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu isn't a name that is instantly recognisable, neither in his native Turkey nor the many countries he represents across Europe. His job title - President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe - is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s an influential role in an institution that keeps itself busy, even if doesn’t have the greatest amount of clout.

Earlier this evening, following a lecture at the London School of Economics, I asked Mr Çavuşoğlu what his ambitions were. Surely after eight years in the Council of Europe, a man of his experience and skills has ambitions back home?

“This is the first time I’m saying this publicly,” he said, “but once my term comes to an end I intend to return to Turkey.” That would be an unusual move for his role: presidents of the assembly are permitted to stand for re-election three times, and most of his predecessors have done so. But Mr Çavuşoğlu is cutting his time is Strasbourg short to go back to Turkey, and that’s significant for two reasons.

Firstly, he's built a reputation for himself abroad. Serving as one of Turkey's 12 representatives on the assembly since 2003, he was elected president just over a year ago. It was hailed as a triumph for Turkey's rising diplomatic prowess, nicely complementing the country's Security Council seat and the Turkish secretary-general of the Organisation of Islamic Conference. "A very shrewd political operator," an enthusiastic commentator wrote in Today’s Zaman at the time, adding: "he will have to take positions which may not always be welcomed in Turkey".

Much of his work is subtle. “My number one priority,” he said, “is improving parliamentary diplomacy among Council of Europe member states.” That means meeting junior members of parliament in places like Armenia and Moldova and getting them to speak to their counterparts in other parliaments. It’s not quite headline-grabbing material; it’s about spreading democratic values, but it also means he will be recognisable to the next generation of European leaders. Clever, if it works.

The subtlety extends to Turkish politics too: Mr Çavuşoğlu is a founding member of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party, and was reportedly not offered a place in the cabinet two years ago purely because of his Council of Europe ambitions. But his distance from home doesn’t stop him commenting on it: this evening he was openly critical of the 10 percent electoral threshold that his own government won’t lower, and said there was much more to do in Turkey’s handling of its Romani community. In response to persistent questioning from William Horsley, of the Association of European Journalists, he was extremely defensive of the AK government’s record on press freedom, claiming not a single journalist had recently been jailed in Turkey “because of freedom of expression”. A doubtful claim, but he was confident enough to make it.

This leads to the second reason why Mr Çavuşoğlu’s return home is significant: he hinted very heavily at pastures new. At this evening’s talk, I raised the example of the cabinet which, despite the presence of heavyweights like Ahmet Davutoğlu, foreign minister, is rather bereft when it comes to international experience. Many members of the cabinet, including the prime minister, speak little English.

If, when his term ends in eleven months’ time, he truly doesn’t run for re-election, it will be a rather different Turkey he returns to. The 2011 election will be out of the way, and a fresh AK government will be in power. The question of President Abdullah Gül’s term in office – either five years, ending in 2012, or a single term of seven years – will have finally been settled. We will also know whether Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prime minister, who has already said he won’t be leading his party at the end of its next term in government, will attempt a rise to the presidency.

Mr Çavuşoğlu won’t yet have the gravitas at home necessary to contest a party leadership contest to replace Mr Erdoğan, but he could be the man from whom to seek support. He could easily be a future foreign minister, handed the reins of Turkey’s new “zero problems” policy.

"I don't know what I will do," he said. "It's not always for me to choose." Then he grinned broadly.

Not the mimics of a man dreaming of an early retirement. This man is one to watch.

The democratic deficit in Turkey's electoral system

2011-02-17T15:12:00.000+02:00

Supporters of proportional representation rejoice! Turkish voters have true equality in our time. Turkey's constitutional court has just ruled that Turkish members of parliament should be elected not according to their province, but the number of voters that live in it. It follows a challenge from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) to a law passed in parliament last year.

Turkey is divided into 81 provinces, ranging from tiny Bayburt (in the northeast, population 90 thousand) to gargantuan Istanbul (where everyone thinks it is, population 13 million). The number of MPs allocated to each province is determined by the Electoral Commission, which looks at each province's record population for the previous year and shares out Turkey's 550 MPs accordingly.

That might sound quite fair. But Turkey's population is heavily concentrated in the country's northwest: the further south and the further east you go, the smaller provinces become. So small are some provinces - such as Bayburt - that the proportional system would barely allocate them a single member of parliament. The unrevised law would have ensured every province had at least two representatives.

Is it a vote winner for the opposition? Possibly. The smallest provinces are likelier to vote for the ruling AK Party than the CHP. Bayburt no exception: they voted overwhelmingly (60 percent) for AK and will likely do so again, meaning that they'll now return half as many AK representatives. The superfluous MP, meanwhile, will be allocated to a larger town where CHP has a better chance.

But there is a broader question about democratic deficit here. What if the sitting MP resigns his seat, or dies in office? Provinces like Bayburt would be left with no representative at all. And by-elections are rarely held in Turkey: hours after the 2007 election, a newly-elected MP for the third-placed Nationalist Action Party was killed in a traffic accident while on his way to collect his credentials. He was not replaced.

The real problem is that Turkey has too many provinces. There were originally 67 of them until Turgut Özal, prime minister for much of the 1980s, had the idea of upgrading certain larger towns, mostly in the deprived southeast to provinces. This gave them their own governor (appointed from Ankara), a larger share of the state budget and, crucially, their very own licence plate code. Since then, the promise of provincehood has become something of a vote winner, and sure enough the cake is to be divided further: two towns are to break off from Hakkari and Şanlıurfa provinces, both in the southeast, after the next election. What is really needed is a complete reorganisation.

Update 11am, 18 February: it would appear from Tarhan Erdem's calculations in this morning's Radikal that the only province that would be reduced to one MP is indeed Bayburt. Istanbul's tally soars from 70 to 85. The only region of the country outside of the northwest to be represented by more MPs after the next election is, interestingly, the southeast.

Did Erdogan tell Mubarak to go? Just a little bit.

2011-02-01T18:48:00.006+02:00

Amidst all the drama coming out of Egypt, there's been a bit of a buzz about the Turkish prime minister's call to Hosni Mubarak. A number of outlets - notably the excitable Los Angeles Times - have been reporting that Mr Erdoğan used his speech today to turn against the Egyptian president and call on him to step down. That's not strictly true. Here's what he said:

"I want to make a very genuine recommendation, a very heartfelt warning to the President of Egypt Mr Hosni Mubarak," the prime minister said earlier today. "We are mortals, not permanent. Each one of us will die and will be questioned on that which we have left behind. As Muslims, we will all be going to a two-cubic-metre hole (in the ground). ... All that comes with you will be your shroud.

"That is why we should listen to the voices of both our consciences and our people. Lend an ear to the people's cry, to their most humane demands, and meet their call for change without hesitation. ... Freedoms can no longer be delayed or overlooked in today's world. Elections that span over months cannot be called democracy."

A few points on this:

1. These were carefully crafted remarks. Mr Erdoğan did not explicitly call on Mr Mubarak to go. He urged "quick action" so that there is "no opportunity" given to those "dark forces" who want to "exploit the people's call for change" - all those words are his.

2. This is not a call from the Turkish parliament. Mr Erdoğan was addressing his parliamentary party, not the general assembly, when he said the above. No motion has been tabled or passed.

3. The obvious: Turkey is Muslim. Clearly, it's significant that the democratically-elected leader of the Muslim world's best example of a democracy has spoken out in defence of Egypt's protest movement. Mr Erdoğan's stock has risen in the Arab world over his outspoken comments on Israel. The question is whether his words carry weight now.

4. America's implicit support: Mr Erdoğan was one of the world leaders to receive a call during Barack Obama's telephone diplomacy session over the weekend. I would be astonished if today's statement comes as a surprise to the United States.

5. For you seasoned followers of Turkish domestic politics, the right-wing Nationalist Action Party (MHP) used the events in Egypt to send a warning to the prime minister. "Abuse of the state's power and resources can have consequences," said Devlet Bahçeli, party leader, in a speech to his own parliamentary party. He is absolutely right: it's partly why his own party was booted out of government in 2002.

MHP chauvinism: make your wife vote for us

2011-01-25T14:28:00.001+02:00

News from the bastion of Turkey's right wing: the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) is on the prowl for the female vote. It appears, according to this story from Habertürk (via NTV), that it has finally dawned upon the party leadership that their support base is overwhelmingly male. At the last election, the MHP appears to have learned, the six million votes it received were not equally split between women and men. In fact, fewer than two million women voted them.

This shouldn't be news to anyone other than the MHP. The party leadership has spent years ignoring opinion polls telling them that their support base is overwhelmingly patrilineal. This gender inequality is reflected in the party leadership: Devlet Bahçeli's top team is almost all male. Indeed, many have speculated he himself is an Edward Heath-esque bachelor. The division can also be seen in parliament, where just two of the party's 70 MPs are women.

The MHP's explanation for this electoral deficit comes from its deputy leader, Osman Çakır: our voters' wives aren't voting for us.

"Either these four million men are bachelors, or their wives aren't voting for us," Haberturk quotes him as saying. "A large majority of these men cannot be bachelors, which means votes have not come to the MHP from the women in these households."

Astonishingly, he goes on: "That is why we joke among ourselves by saying 'these men don't treat their wives well, so they react by voting for another party. If they treated them better, this wouldn't be the case'."

Turkish women are woefully under-represented in parliament. The MHP's two token MPs are at the bottom of the pile. The ruling AK Party and opposition CHP have slightly better ratios - nine and eight percent of their parliamentary parties respectively are women - although there are only two women in the cabinet. Both AK and the CHP have pledged to increase female representation at the next election, but it seems unlikely they'll reach the standard set by the pro-Kurdish BDP: one-third of its MPs are women.

Meanwhile, the message to MHP men is clear: treat your women better, because your political party is at stake.

The party leadership is planning to launch its campaign on 28 January under the slogan "Raise your voice, Turkey", when a number of electoral pledges aimed at women - state support for childcare and maternity leave - will be announced.

Last week in my prediction piece for the upcoming election, I said Turkey needed a third party in parliament, and that the MHP should cross the electoral threshold. But with the likes of Mr Çakır in the party, it isn't always that easy to support that.

Who will win Turkey's next general election?

2011-01-17T00:07:00.001+02:00

Some astonishing news for you: Turkey's parliament is playing by the rules. That's right. The Grand National Assembly is preparing for an election at the scheduled time.(*) For the first time in decades, longer than most of us can remember, Turkish people will not be dragged to the ballot box because of an exodus of MPs from the ruling party, or a collapsed coalition, or a military intervention. No, the 2011 general election will take place because the rulebook, Turkey's constitution, says it is time for one.

You could say this is a sign of more stable, predictable times in Turkish politics. To a certain extent, you would be right. With six months to go until voting day it looks like AK, the party of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prime minister, is set to win a third consecutive victory.

That shouldn't surprise many people. Mr Erdoğan's party has a solid record of progress, and it would take someone quite obstinate to argue Turkish people are not better off now than when AK came to power in 2002. Opinion polls suggest the ruling party is likely to win around 45 percent of the vote, close to what they got last time.

But even though the victor is already pretty clear, it is an important election for Turkey. This is what I will be watching out for over the coming six months:

1) Distribution of seats in the new parliament

An AK victory might appear inevitable, but the size of that victory is far from certain. One reason for this is the resurgence of the main opposition CHP. Their newish leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu has been working to collect the anti-AK vote under one roof, and has had some success in broadening his party's appeal to voters who supported the right-wing Nationalist Action Party (MHP) at the last election.

Analysts believe that if the CHP can win 30 percent of the vote (up from 20 percent in 2007), they can seriously dent AK's chances of governing alone by winning enough seats to rival them in the chamber.

AK's target is for at least 50 percent of the popular vote. CHP are aiming "to govern alone". Both seem quite far-fetched at this stage, but both objectives reflect the two parties' urgency to win as many seats as possible.

2) The fate of the nationalists

Turkey's electoral system operates a 10 percent threshold. If a party's national share of the vote does not cross that line, it cannot be represented in parliament, regardless of how well they do in individual provinces. As I blogged yonks ago, it's too high and needs to be lowered, but it has helped the AK Party win two crushing parliamentary majorities. Unsurprisingly, they aren't about to kick away the ladder that carried them up to where they are.

AK and the CHP are probably both going to cross the threshold this year, but the same can't be said for the MHP. Polls suggest Devlet Bahçeli's party is in trouble. By some estimates, they may crash below the threshold and out of parliament. That would be in the interests of the two larger parties, giving both of them more seats to play with.

It would not be in the interests of democratic representation. Just over half - 55 percent - of Turkish voters were represented in parliament after the 2002 election because AK and the CHP were the only parties who crossed the threshold. MHP joined them after the 2007 election, meaning that four in every five votes, a better proportion, were represented. Turkey is too pluralistic for at two-party system. A third party must cross.

Nonetheless, all three parties have been stepping up the nationalist rhetoric in recent weeks, which might explain Mr Erdoğan's bizarre intervention to tear down a statue near the Armenian border or his recent war of words with German chancellor Angela Merkel over her recent visit to the Greek side of Cyprus. Expect Israel or the EU to come up before long.

3) What will the prime minister do next?

This is the biggie. Mr Erdoğan has already said that this next term will be his last as leader of his party. He has spoken somewhat wistfully of disappearing somewhere quiet and warm to write his memoirs, but most commentators reckon he has ambitions for the next rung of the ladder - the presidency.

Whether he can achieve this depends on what happens to the incumbent, his former deputy Abdullah Gül. When Mr Gül was elected by parliament in 2007, it was for a single seven-year term, much like his predecessors. But one month later the constitution was amended by referendum: Turkish presidents are now elected - by the people, not parliament - for a maximum two five-year terms.

It is still not clear whether Mr Gül's term of office will measured by the old rules under which he was elected, or the new rules that replaced them. He could have to stand for re-election as early as next year, or serve until 2014. Of course, Mr Erdoğan could start work after the parliamentary election on a new constitution that changes the system entirely - rumours abound of a French-style presidential system, which Mr Erdoğan is understood to covet.

4) The date and the candidates

Sunday 12 June is everyone's best guess for voting day, supported by both CHP and MHP. The government has until March to fire the starting gun, however, and chances are they'll take their time.

In the meantime, the parties have been thinking about their candidates for parliament. Political parties in Turkey are extremely centralised, with every list - 81 of them, one for every province - being personally endorsed by the party leader. In 2007, AK notoriously culled large numbers of its 2002 intake to make way for those who had curried greater favour, and could do the same again.

Interesting names are being banded about, too. Erkan Mumcu - a former AK minister who held the key for Mr Gül's first presidential run, dropped it, then disappeared into nothingness - is reportedly considering a run on the MHP ticket.

An interesting few months await.

(*) Well, nearly. Following the 2007 referendum, Turkish terms of parliament were reduced from five years to four, which means this year's election should be held on 22 July, but given that people last time were queuing in temperatures above 35°C last time, voting looks likely to be brought forward a month.

Martians 'invade Turkey', Court dismisses case

2011-01-13T11:14:00.000+02:00

One of the amendments brought in by last September's referendum on constitutional change was the right for Turkish citizens to apply directly to the Constitutional Court, the highest judicial body in the land. The court tended to busy itself with constitutional disputes, such as whether the ruling AK Party should be closed down, and only accepted applications from politicians and the like.

Now, the Constitutional Court will be an additional level of appeal for ordinary Turkish citizens who feel their cases were not adequately handled by the Court of First Instance and the Court of Appeal. The move has been hailed as an emancipation, a Great Leap Forward for Turkish citizen rights and a way for a court so often seen as aloof to connect with ordinary people.

How fitting, then, that the first ever "ordinary" application to the court has come from someone claiming his mind has been invaded by Martians.

"I suspect my mind has been invaded by Martians," NTVMSNBC reports the applicant as saying. "I have evidence to support this. Please intervene."

Regretfully, the applicant has been sent a response saying Martian coercion is outside the Constitutional Court's remit. It's a shame: we may never know what the evidence was.

Time, gentlemen: Efes Pilsen, Turkey's top basketball team, is forced off court

2011-01-08T16:03:00.002+02:00

Turkey's most successful basketball team found out yesterday that it must change its name or close down because it shares its name with an alcoholic beverage. The team falls foul of new laws passed by parliament that broaden the ban on alcohol and tobacco advertising to the naming of sports clubs. Efes Pilsen, the team named after Turkey's most popular beer, is the most prominent victim of the new rules.

Alcohol has a long history of sport sponsorship around the world. One Canadian brewer that backed England's football Premier League for years now has its name splashed all over the Carling Cup competition, whilst rugby union's Heineken Cup would be an entirely different affair without that famous Dutch beer. It's happened in Turkey too: Efes Pilsen and Tuborg are two examples of teams carrying their sponsor companies' names.

Turkey's latest alcohol advertising ban is not unusual. France, where the Heineken Cup is abbreviated to the "H Cup", also restricts alcohol sponsorship in sport. But critics say the Turkish version was passed to placate the pious supporters of the governing party. The AK Party is mildly Islamic, to put it, well, mildly, and few doubt that some sections of its voting base would happily see alcohol banned in the country entirely. Council leaders have often spoken of plans to move all licenced restaurants and bars within their town to an allocated zone, effectively a red light district, and to issue a ban outside it. Nor is the trend restricted to excitable local politicians. The cabinet has not been shy to raise the consumption tax on booze - it increased by as much as 30 percent last October, much to the chagrin of consumers such as the Turkish Wine Forum.

Efes Pilsen now has a year to change its name, and it's not clear what route the team is going to take. Anadolu, Efes's parent company, has signalled it might pull out of basketball entirely. That would be a tragedy, depriving Turkish basketball of its most successful team ever: Efes Pilsen has won the national league 13 times and has a European title under its belt too. Another possibility is to drop Pilsen from the name, so as to become Efes Istanbul or Efes Anadolu. A third option would be to merge forces with an existing club - Beşiktaş Efes, anyone?

UPDATE (09 January, 2pm): An internet campaign, "Kulübüme dokunma - Don't touch my club" has appeared collecting signatures against the new law. See it at kulubumedokunma.com.

Things we already knew: Kılıçdaroğlu better than Baykal

2011-01-06T02:16:00.001+02:00

There's been a smattering of coverage in the Turkish press of a public opinion survey that paints the leader of Turkey's main opposition party in better light than his predecessor. "The Kılıçdaroğlu vaccine has worked" trumpets today's Cumhuriyet, a staunchly secular newspaper. 68 percent of the party's voters think its new leader is more successful, while 13 percent prefer former leader Deniz Baykal, it reports. So far, so good for Mr Kılıçdaroğlu?

Possibly. Trouble is, that was the easy part. Many party members - and many others outside the party, like this blog - were so disillusioned about the CHP's direction and agenda under the previous leadership that a change at the top was seen as the only way forward. So not being Mr Baykal had already guaranteed Mr Kılıçdaroğlu points.

New leaders of major political parties tend to experience a public opinion bounce. Mr Kılıçdaroğlu's honeymoon period was particularly short: events in the eastern Mediterranean involving a certain flotilla put paid to that. In the months that followed, the new leader's challenge was to win over his party, a party whose leader had gone, but whose old guard remained. It appears quite clear, following a period of internal skulduggery that culminated in a stormy party congress late last year, that Mr Kılıçdaroğlu now has that steady grip on the CHP leadership.

Some of these poll results will be encouraging to him. 53 percent of respondents think CHP was a "revolutionary" (awkward word, I know) party, as against 33 percent who say it represented the status quo. That result would certainly have been the other way around during the Baykal era. There were also positive responses when asked whether the CHP leadership was "in touch with the people": more than 9 percent name him as the politician they most admire, ahead of Devlet Bahçeli, who has led the third-placed Nationalist Action Party for donkey's years, and well ahead of Mr Baykal's best results.

However, Mr Kılıçdaroğlu was only third in the popularity contest. Prime Minister Erdoğan was first (22 percent) and President Abdullah Gül second (10 percent), which illustrates the scale of his next challenge: winning over the country. A majority of Metropoll's respondents (56 percent) believe Mr Kılıçdaroğlu and his team can not lead the CHP to power, and an overwhelming 72 percent do not believe the party could solve the Kurdish issue.

The next challenge, then, is for Mr Kılıçdaroğlu to win over the country. He has recorded a modest improvement in his party's standing, as the latest Metropoll survey shows, but the governing AK Party remains firmly in the lead. He has six months to prove his worth.

Metropoll interviewed 1504 people in 31 Turkish provinces between 25 and 29 December 2010. The full survey can be found here.

Opinion poll suggests huge gains for CHP; hollow victory for AK Party

2011-01-05T09:16:00.003+02:00

Metropoll's latest opinion poll* just over a week ago asked, among other things, for voting intention. Here are the topline percentages, with changes from the 2009 local election:

AK Party: 45.3 (+6.5) [Justice and Development Party, governing, religious conservative]
CHP: 30.7 (+7.3) [Republican People's Party, secularist]
MHP: 13.8 (+0.3) [Nationalist Action Party, nationalist]
BDP: 6.5 (+2.7) [Peace and Democracy Party, pro-Kurdish]
SP: 1.3 (-0.3)** [Felicity Party, strongly Islamist]
DP: 0.6 (-0.5) [Democrat Party, centre-right]
HAS Party: 0.8 (-2.9)** [People's Voice Party, split from SP]
Others: 0.5

These findings suggest a flock in support towards the four mainstream parties. This is interesting considering we are probably just over six months away from a general election, and Turkish political parties tend to proliferate - rather than unite - around this time.

If this were replicated at a general election, this would be a substantial stride forward for the CHP and its best result in 34 years. For other parties, this poll appears to reproduce the 2007 election result: the governing AK Party stages a recovery from its poor local election showing two years ago, whereas the MHP records a small drop in support that is within the margin of error. All other parties, save the BDP whose members will probably run as independents, fall below the 10 percent threshold.

So how would parliament look in such a scenario? Interestingly, despite the similarities in vote proportions to 2007, the seat distribution would look remarkably different:***

AK Party: 265 seats (-70)
CHP: 180 seats (+79)
MHP: 85 seats (+15)
BDP: 20 seats (no change)

The AK Party would shed around a fifth of its seats and lose its governing majority in the process. The CHP, meanwhile, would be far from able to govern alone and would seriously struggle to lead a coalition with these numbers, but would still become the single largest opposition party AK have ever seen. But why?

The answer lies in vote representation. In 2007, 89 percent of Turks voted for parties and independent candidates who ended up being represented in parliament. Under this poll, the figure would be 96.3 percent. If the findings of this opinion poll are correct, it represents an exodus of voters from the smaller parties. It suggests Turks are aware their vote is less likely to be represented if they don't vote big.

* Metropoll interviewed 1504 people in 31 Turkish provinces between 25 and 29 December 2010. The full survey can be found here.
** The HAS Party split off from the SP late last year. Figures for both parties are compared to SP's 2009 local election result.
*** The above is a crude and entirely unscientific swing, assuming the 10 percent electoral threshold is not lowered and the pro-Kurdish BDP's 20 MPs decide to run again as independents, this poll would roughly produce the following seat distribution in parliament (with changes from the present situation).

New Year cheer: how Top Gear offended Turkey

2010-12-30T02:08:00.002+02:00

Fans of the BBC's popular motoring show Top Gear will be aware that their latest adventure saw them drive across the Middle East towards Bethlehem. They were following in the footsteps of the Three Wise Men, they explained, but intended to replicate their journey in sports cars - part of which took them through southeastern Turkey. It was a hugely entertaining episode and I enjoyed it immensely, but it was characteristically outspoken and managed to offend some Turks in the process.

That in itself is not a particularly difficult to do, but for those foreigners who don't understand why the Turks were offended - and, indeed, those who haven't seen the programme - here's my guide to Top Gear's transgressions. It comes complete with "blunders thou shall commit" warnings of my own, in case you plan to tread on a few toes yourself. We begin fifteen minutes into the programme, outside Irbil in Northern Iraq.

After spending their first few days travelling wearing bulletproof vests, the presenters come to the conclusion that northern Iraq really is not as dangerous as its more southerly regions. Sitting in the garden of their hotel, Jeremy Clarkson says:

I'm glad we've gone to Iraq. I'm sorry, I know this is Iraq, okay, but it's the Kurdistan region of Iraq, so it's full of Kurds...and they're all lovely. Everybody's very friendly. It's about as dangerous as Cheltenham.

and they all proceed to remove their bulletproof vests. Blunder #1: do not suggest Kurdish people are nice. Especially if you're about to visit Turkey.

That is precisely what they do. At the border, their cars are combed by border guards and sniffer dogs on the Turkish side. The presenters are taken aback by levels of security they haven't seen so far, and in fact will not see again until they reach Israel. At one point, the guard finds a cigarette lighter in the shape of a bullet, and the theatrically jittery way Richard Hammond shuffles over to explain himself makes him look like he's actually smuggling heroin.

Once they are allowed through, the trio are handed an envelope from the programme's producers containing new instructions on how to reach Bethlehem. It reads:

You idiots. You have escaped from a region where there is no war into a region where there is. The Kurds are fighting the Turks for independence so if you really are Wise Men you will get to your hotel in the safe zone by nightfall.

Attached to the instructions is the British Foreign Office's latest travel advice to British citizens for the region, which Jeremy Clarkson proceeds to read out. It currently says:

We advise against all but essential travel in the provinces of Hakkari, Sirnak, Siirt and Tunceli and visitors should remain vigilant when travelling in other provinces in south eastern Turkey. Terrorist attacks are regularly carried out against the security forces in the south east of the country by the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party.

They all proceed to put their bulletproof vests back on.

Blunder #2: Never suggest Turkey is a dangerous place or slander the country's good name by daring to mention there are terrorists about.

The rest of the Top Gear team's time in Turkey will be familiar to any foreigner, and many Turks too. They drive through endless potholes and complain about the quality of the roads; they are relieved when they finally find a decent bit of dual carriageway, and bemused to discover both directions of traffic are still sharing the same piece of road; they encounter police checkpoints; they are eager to reach their destination before dusk to avoid driving at night; and one of their number gets food poisoning.

Blunder #3: Do not complain about Turkey's infrastructure, its traffic management, its driving habits, or the quality of its food. You're wrong.

But all that was before the killer remark, just after the border into Syria was cleared:

We've only been in Syria for half a mile and already it's better than Turkey.

Blunder #4: Ouch!

Turkey's most-watched news channel, NTV, said "exaggerated remarks" were made in the programme that "disparaged Turkey". The report went on: "The presenters wore bulletproof vests and helmets and said that the southeast of Turkey should be considered a war zone." The Doğan News Agency said the programme "showered Turkey with insults", while Sabah said that "as they crossed into Turkey, the three presenters exhibited panicky behaviour [as a vehicle for] their propaganda of fear".

Also interesting was the online response. The user "Gejo" on Ekşisözlük, a popular social networking site, accuses Top Gear of supporting an unlikely alliance of the PKK terrorist organisation and Fethullah Gülen, an influential Islamic cleric who is currently living in self-imposed exile in the United States. The user adds: "some heavy insults have been made towards Turkey, they must definitely have been funded by America". If only so - British licence fee payers would be delighted.

Of course the comments on Top Gear should not be taken seriously - I certainly don't. But the minor furore surrounding this episode has exposed something about Turkish people: they are ashamed of the state of the southeastern region. They are proud of their country and want visitors to see its best bits, not the parts with the dilapidated roads and heavy security. But this is more than just attempting to sweep ugliness under the carpet. There is a feeling of sorrow that Turkey is bundled together with Iraq, Syria and Israel - countries more prominently associated with volatility.

The reality is that parts of southeastern Turkey are extremely dangerous. Security forces do clash with PKK members. Both sides shoot to kill. There probably are more terror attacks in that part of the country than in Iraqi Kurdistan. But it was safe enough for a motoring entertainment show to visit, and while that's not exactly going to herald an influx of tourists, it does indicate a degree of normality for a region that has spent most of the last three decades in a state of emergency. That counts for something.

Happy New Year - my best wishes to everyone for 2011, an election year for Turkey. My thoughts and predictions coming here next.

WikiLeaks revelations: Turkey snubbed over NATO deal

2010-11-28T23:08:00.000+02:00

Turkey had spoken loudly and resolutely against Anders Fogh Rasmussen taking the reins at NATO when the secretary-general post became vacant early last year.

The Turkish position was entirely personal: Mr Rasmussen, then Danish prime minister, refused to clamp down on pro-PKK television stations inside Denmark. Turkey also objected because of Denmark's handling of that cartoon crisis. It was only resolved when Barack Obama personally intervened. But all this was already known.

What we didn't know then, but do know now, is that part of the deal was for "a qualified Turk" would be considered for the position of Mr Rasmussen's deputy. But the Turkish foreign ministry official goes on:

Instead...a German of uncompelling merit was selected. "We suspect a deal between Rasmussen and Merkel." ... "We missed an opportunity with the selection of the Assistant Secretary General." [the official] added: "We let Rasmussen have Secretary General, because we trusted you."

Who is this German of "uncompelling merit"? NATO's website throws up no clues.

Turkey aided al Qaida, apparently

2010-11-28T02:29:00.001+02:00

Turkish aid has gone directly to al Qaida in Iraq, while the United States has similarly assisted the PKK in the region. That, at least, is what is rumoured to be in some of the US diplomatic correspondence that is to be imminently released by the online whistleblower Wikileaks.

The Turkish press picked up on the story over the weekend as it emerged Turkey was one of the countries briefed by the US State Department. It appears there has been a warning to expect something "potentially embarrassing". To whom, and in what way, remains to be seen.

Being only rumours, there's little real comment I can make. You don't need me to tell you that, if vindicated, this could be explosive. But it all does seem just a little too far-fetched.

The Twitter scene seems to think there will be a release at 4.30pm New York City time tomorrow (Sunday). We shall wait and see.

Is Bursa a racist town?

2010-11-20T11:54:00.000+02:00

This isn't a football blog. In fact, I can't remember the last time I wrote about it. But the bizarre response to a recent game in the northwestern town of Bursa recently has some telling signs for the way some Turks think.

For the uninitiated, some quick background: Bursaspor are the current Turkish champions. They won the national league in May in a thrilling twist on the final day of the season, becoming only the second team outside of Istanbul to do so. But they were destined to become runners-up until a simultaneous game involving Trabzonspor went Bursa's way: Trabzon, who was out of the running for the championship, defeated the only other contender, Fenerbahçe, to ensure a Bursa victory.

The new season is now well underway, and Bursa and Trabzon played each other - in Bursa - for the first time this season last Saturday. Trabzon won the game 2-0, thus taking the league leadership from a hitherto undefeated Bursa side. I must declare an interest at this stage - I am a Trabzonspor fan, and have been since childhood, and was delighted by the result. But what I found remarkable wasn't the game so much as a televised incident that occurred the following morning on Bursaspor's TV station.

While reviewing newspaper coverage of the game, Seda Çapçı, the presenter, launched into an astonishing rant about Bursa's Black Sea community, ostensibly in response to anti-Bursa chants by Trabzon fans at the game.

"We always saw them as one of us, we never discriminated," she said, before adding: "They opened businesses here, earned their bread here, lived here, sent their children to school here, found work here, and we were happy." She went on to identify specific neighbourhood of Bursa where people from Turkey's Black Sea region tend to live, and taunted them for not showing their faces in the town centre after the game.

Two things are striking about Ms Çapçı's comments: firstly, that they appear to invoke a sense of racial difference where many Turks would not have dreamed of thinking one existed, and secondly, that they had such resonance around the country.

The Laz, as people from the Black Sea are known, have their own language and a distinct language and culture based around the mountainous, fertile region where they have lived for centuries. It's fair to say they are more closely integrated with the rest of Turkey too: they tend to be bilingual, and separatist aspirations have seldom been seen. They are also the butt of several jokes, largely because of their unusual accents and mannerisms, not unlike the Irish or Welsh would be in some English circles.

I spoke to a long-time Bursa resident who told me members of the city's Black Sea community had long been conspicuous in the city. Sometimes their actions would be comical: "I knew this one family who must have moved from a village straight into the city, because - hand on heart - they tended a cow in their fourth floor flat." But never, she told me, were there racist tensions. They were Turks moving from one part of Turkey to another.

However, in the week of Eid al-Adha, when news is slow, Ms Çapçı's comments found nationwide coverage. The day after the broadcast, a group of Trabzon fans gathered outside the main Ataturk memorial in Bursa's central square to read a statement condemning the broadcast, but police had to be called when a fight broke out with fans of the home side. Four Bursa fans were arrested.

Bursaspor TV has since disassociated itself for the comments and issued an apology. Ms Çapçı has been fired, and might be facing charges for inciting hatred.

So, the question remains: is Bursa a racist town? No. As with most football-related incidents, this appears to be the opinion of the few. But it does provoke thought on the mindset of some people in Turkey. This isn't the first time I've highlighted signs of antipathy towards a minority; what is encouraging is that, this time, Ms Çapçı's views did not go unchallenged.

You propose an alliance?

2010-11-18T17:58:00.001+02:00

One of the long-standing customs of Eid al-Adha (Kurban Bayramı, the Festival of Sacrifice) is for people to use the holiday as an opportunity to visit their relatives. Turkish politicians do much the same with their political rivals: for the week-long holiday, hands are wrung, tea is served and baklava is awkwardly nibbled, as representatives from Party X chat to Party Y's people about what a wonderful time of year this is. Of course, the cameras are there to capture the moment.

On the whole, these are tedious affairs that last little longer than half an hour in practice and barely thirty seconds on the evening news. This year, however, there has finally been a reason for excitement: the pro-secular Republican People's Party (CHP) met the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) for the first time.

That in itself is quite something. CHP has long snubbed the smallest party in parliament during the holidays, largely because they have tended to regard the BDP as too close to the PKK and too far from the concept of a undivided Turkish state for comfort. But CHP is under new leadership, undergoing a period of significant renewal, and yesterday's visit revealed that the two have more in common than they think. Both are - ostensibly, at least - parties of the centre-left. Indeed, both were represented at this week's Socialist International council meeting in Paris.

During yesterday's Eid visit, in full view and earshot of the assembled journalists, the BDP proposed an electoral alliance. Unity among the Turkish left has not happened for more than a quarter century, but many proponents believe it is a key step towards unseating the governing (centre-right) AK Party at next year's election.

There would be other material advantages too: BDP members would presumably run on the CHP list, thus avoiding entanglements with the 10 percent electoral threshold. For CHP, it would deliver instant and solid gains in East and Southeast Turkey, a region where they haven't won anything for years. Besides, they have a common rival: BDP's only main challenger in the region is AK. The opportunity for a credible opposition is clear.

So they'd be mad not to go for it, yes? Well, the matter is complicated by the BDP's Kurdish connection. There is a significant nationalist contingent within CHP who, disgusted by the prospect of an alliance, could split the party and take its votes elsewhere - to the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), for example. As Ahmet Altan points out in today's Taraf, "the girl who threw stones at the BDP convoy during a party visit to Izmir [a CHP stronghold] last year would not easily vote CHP".

It is definitely too early to say, but this could be the start of something special.

UPDATE: Milliyet has CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu being rather unequivocal about all this. "Our view is clear: we want to govern alone," he told reporters in Ankara. "We have no search for an alliance, nor have we called for one."

That's that, then.

Despicable journalism on Turkish television

2010-11-17T22:49:00.000+02:00

Tonight saw one of the worst examples of news reporting I have seen in my career.

It all revolved around the story of a three-year-old boy from an Istanbul village, who went missing on Monday. A massive search operation involving the gendarmarie was launched, but by Wednesday evening there was still no news. As residents helped with the hunt, the media went into overdrive. Turkey's plethora of news channels were all reporting live from the scene; at one stage, when there was nothing fresh to cover, they appeared to be taking it in turns to interview the boy's family.

On Wednesday evening, Kanal D, one of the country's "big four" stations, sent a reporter into the boy's family home to provide live two-ways and speak to the family during the main evening news bulletin. During one interview, the reporter, Özay Erad, announced (to camera, not to the boy's mother) that she had just been informed that a child's body had been found a few kilometres outside of the village. The boy's mother is seen to collapse into a frenzy and, as the camera pans in upon the family trying to calm her, the reporter shouts over the commotion that she had misheard her earpiece, and that it was a child's voice that had been heard outside the village.

The boy has since been found safe and well.

A recording of the incident is available on NTVMSNBC, but be warned: the scenes are distressing.

It is journalism at its very worst - causing distress, spreading incorrect information - but all too common among Turkey's mainstream bulletins. So often the news on all four big channels is car crash television: presented by elderly men to an epic film soundtrack (ATV opts for Gladiator), sensationalism is their main ingredient. A typical bulletin may begin with a graphic footage of an overturned lorry on the motorway, followed by close-ups of the blood on the ground from a midnight neighbourhood brawl, interspersed with pictures of the prime minister walking in and out of buildings as a voice drones about proceedings in parliament, before finishing with shots of female European tourists sunning themselves at a Mediterranean resort.

There was plenty wrong with Kanal D's broadcast tonight, not just that the reporter misheard what she was being told by her director. Ms Erad should not have been in the house in the first place: if she had to be near the scene, she should have stationed herself outside. If she had an inkling of doubt, she should have asked the gallery to repeat the report to her. She should have emphasised that the report she was communicating to the viewers was unconfirmed. The first time the boy's mother heard the rumour that her son might be dead should not have been from this reporter. None of it should have been on live television.

Kanal D should be ashamed. I certainly would be.

What does Turkey's referendum change? The Constitutional Court.

2010-09-09T20:26:00.008+03:00

Summary: The proposed new Constitutional Court would be larger, appointed in part by parliament but largely still by the president, and see its military representation reduced.

Turkey's present constitution was drafted by the country's last military government in 1982. It is a flawed document: weak on personal freedoms, power is placed firmly in the hands of the state, and plenty of checks and balances are held by the military. All major political parties agree it should be completely rewritten, but disagree on how to do it.

In Turkey's civil legal system, the Constitutional Court is the highest authority, handling matters relating to the constitution and frequently called upon to resolve disputes. Since AK came to power in 2002, opposition parties – in particular, the CHP – have used the Court as one avenue to prevent what they see as the government’s gradual dismantling of the secular system. Frequent appeals have made the Court highly influential cover current affairs; the current president, Haşim Kılıç, has been something of a regular in this blog.

As it stands, the Court is made up of 11 permanent and 4 reserve judges. Candidates for membership are nominated in lists of three by the highest level courts in the country, including military ones, with some input from a board of university rectors (see table). The president then appoints one judge from each list of three.

If Sunday’s referendum passes, the current system of appointing four 'reserve' judges would be abolished. All would sit on the Court for a single 12-year term, and their number would increase by six to 17 judges. The institutions that elect members to the Constitutional Court would be also altered: the Court of Appeal, for instance, would be allowed to appoint one more member, whereas the Higher Education Council would see its representation tripled.

The changes being put to referendum on Sunday would also loosen the president's monopoly on appointing members: parliament would approve two members from the Court of Accounts – the highest auditing authority – and one from nominees in the legal profession. All three would be approved by simple majority.

So what’s controversial? The big fuss is over the "senior individuals" category. The constitutional amendment defines these individuals as selected from among “high-grade directors, lawyers, top rank judges and prosecutors, and Constitutional Court rapporteurs who have served for at least five years”. The president would be granted powers to select four individuals that are suited to that description. He does not have to refer to any institution, nor is he required to accept formal advice. It’s effectively a personal appointment for four judges, who would represent a fifth of the enlarged Court.

As the above chart indicates, the "senior individuals" group of judges (coloured orange) wouldn't see a drastic change in representation if the changes are approved. More significant are changes to the Higher Education Council (teal) and the Court of Accounts (mauve), which increase their representation, while the two military representatives (green and purple) are reduced.

The government says this enlarged court will broaden representation on the highest court in the land. Writing in Hürriyet last month Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, CHP leader, argued that the increased representation of institutions largely appointed by the president and cabinet – such as the Higher Education Council and Court of Accounts – is an attempt by the executive to seize control of the legislature.

Turkey will say 'yes' in next month's referendum, according to poll

2010-08-24T22:18:00.007+03:00

Quite in contrast to my predictions of a tight result at Turkey's constitutional referendum on 12 September, GENAR have released a poll that suggests quite a strong yes vote:

Yes: 56.2%
No: 43.8%

The poll predicts a turnout of 87 percent, which is higher than the last referendum (67 percent) and strikes me as rather high even by Turkey's recent electoral record. Predictably, much of the voting is along party lines: a crushing number of governing AK Party supporters (98.1%) will vote yes, while a similarly huge number of opposition CHP supporters (91.8%) will vote no.

Murat Yetkin writes in today's Radikal that the Kurdish vote is something Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prime minister, is depending on to pass his prized reforms. The pro-Kurdish BDP has boycotted the referendum, but more than half of its supporters say they will vote anyway and are more likely to vote yes than not, GENAR's polling suggests. BDP leaders have offered to support a yes vote in exchange for some promises for further reform from the government, but polling like this appears to indicate the BDP holds less influence over Kurdish voters than it likes to believe.

GENAR asked about awareness of the package being put up for referendum: 80.3% said they hadn't read the proposed changes. Of those who had, a narrow majority (23% vs 20%) said they would be voting yes. Those who they had followed debates in the media to some degree (59.7%) were more likely to be voting no.

I'll have more analysis of the referendum package - and that all-important Kurdish vote - in the coming days.

General election voting
GENAR also asked how respondents would vote if there was a general election on Sunday. The headline percentages were (with changes from the last GENAR poll I covered in January):

AK Party: 41.0 (+4.5) [Justice and Development Party, governing, religious conservative]
CHP : 28.0 (+5.1) [Republican People's Party, secular]
MHP : 14.9 (-3.9) [Nationalist Action Party, nationalist]
BDP : 5.1 (-2.0)* [Peace and Democracy Party, pro-Kurdish]
SP : 2.7 (-1.3) [Felicity Party, strongly Islamist]
Others : 8.3 (-2.5) [includes independents]

The changes look quite large, but remember that there is an eight-month gap between this and the previous poll. Support for AK is up; support for the CHP is up by a greater amount, attributable to the rise of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.

More interesting is the exodus from the right-wing MHP: almost a third of people who voted MHP at the 2007 general election said they would not vote for them again. A quarter of these floaters said they would now switch to CHP. This reflects a trend in recent GENAR polls: many MHP voters appear to be disenchanted with their party. Only 74 percent said they would support their party's position at the upcoming referendum (as opposed to 98 percent and 92 percetof AK and CHP voters respectively). Turkish voters at large seem to feel the same way: 84 percent said they could never imagine Devlet Bahçeli, MHP leader, becoming prime minister.

How would these latest voting intentions look in parliament? Well, keep in mind that the following is a crude uniform swing, assuming the BDP's 20 MPs run as independents and retain their seats (with changes from the present situation):

AK Party: 259 (-77)
CHP : 177 (+74)
MHP : 94 (+24)
BDP : 20 (NC)

So in parliament this would represent a clear swing from AK to CHP. It would also be coalition territory: AK would be just short of the 276 seats needed to govern alone; CHP+MHP together wouldn't be able to reach this threshold either.

GENAR interviewed 2274 people in 16 Turkish provinces between 31 July and 8 August 2010. The full survey can be found here. * Figures compared with the Democratic Society Party, now banned.

Three things that can lose you a referendum

2010-08-21T21:16:00.002+03:00

It's referendum time in Turkey again. On 12 September, 49 million or so Turks will be asked to approve the latest package of substantive changes to the constitution drafted 28 years ago by the country's last military junta. In the best traditions of irony, voting day wil also mark thirty years since the coup that put that junta in power.

The last time Turks were consulted on constitutional change was October 2007, when the headline reform was to the presidency. "We want a president elected by the people," the AK government proclaimed, "and may he hold office for two five-year terms." 69 percent of voters agreed. Changes relating to parliament's voting rules and term in office were bundled into the same package. All said, an easy win.

Three weeks tomorrow, voters will be called back again, but this time it won't be as straightforward for the AK Party. Opinion polls indicate the yes vote is ahead, but only narrowly so, and a large proportion of voters are still undecided. Three reasons help explain why 2007 won't be repeated again.

The first is the Turkish army, which is not a factor in this referendum. In 2007, the General Staff published its notorious "e-coup" online, criticising the government and the threat it posed to the secular state. The gamble back-fired: AK called a snap poll, was returned by an increased majority, and went through a honeymoon period that helped it comfortably win the referendum too. Many AK supporters then were simply those alarmed by the prospect of a military intervention.

This time, there is no stand-off with the military. Aside from a spat surrounding the appointment of one particular general to the post of Land Forces Commander, the government and army have been in full agreement - over the fight against the PKK - and there is no anti-coup sentiment to exploit.

This helps partly explain the second reason why history won't be repeated - that the government's support base is shrinking. 2007 saw a strong government with a strong mandate presiding over a strengthening economy; 2010 brings us a weaker government with a nearly-expired mandate, presiding over an economy out of recession but facing unemployment above 10 percent. Put another way, the people are bored with this government and aren't all that richer than they were three years ago. Besides, they now have a credible alternative.

Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu was elected leader of the opposition CHP in late May. Turkish voters were interested: here at last was a personality to rival Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prime minister, who spoke colloquially about jobs and public services, and didn't have that aura of elitism that followed the former CHP leader around.

Mr Kılıçdaroğlu has maintained his party's support of a no vote, not entirely out of a compulsive rejection of anything proposed by AK, but also because of rational argument: why, for instance, is a package of such diverse reforms being voted as a whole, rather than as individual clauses? The CHP leader's voice will sway many in the next few weeks.

The third reason why this referendum will be no easy win is that the proposed reforms are hideously complicated. I certainly can't profess to understanding them all yet, and I suspect a lot of the Turkish public is with me. Part of the reason for this is the lack of any headlining reform: in 2007, people were promised the right to elect their own president. Most people understood that. In 2010, people are being promised that senior judges will be appointed in a slightly different way. A marketing dream this is not.

As it stands, the governing AK party is supported by the far-right Great Union Party (BBP) and the religious Felicity Party (SP) in a yes vote. Aside from the CHP, the major parties urging a no vote are the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), the centre-right Democrats (DP) and the centre-left DSP. The pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) are currently boycotting the vote, but have incidated they may switch to a yes if some of their demands are met.

But more on that in a future post. Over the coming weeks, I'll examine the arguments of the yes and no camps, cover the political machinations as Mssrs Erdoğan and Kılıçdaroğlu campaign, and come to a - no doubt highly influential - conclusion over what verdict Turks should reach on 12 September.

Poll shows first CHP lead in eight years

2010-06-06T12:37:00.013+03:00

The week's events in the Mediterranean have clouded many things, including an interesting set of opinion polls published by SONAR at the end of last month. Here are the topline percentages for voting intention, with changes from the company's last published survey in January:

CHP: 32.5 (+5.4) [Republican People's Party, secularist]
AK Party: 31.1 (+1.6) [Justice and Development Party, governing, religious conservative]
MHP: 18.6 (-1.8) [Nationalist Action Party, nationalist]
BDP: 4.3 (-2.0) [Peace and Democracy Party, pro-Kurdish]
SP: 3.7 (-1.8) [Felicity Party, strongly Islamist]
DSP: 3.5 (+0.5) [Democratic Left Party, centre-left]
DP: 2.4 (-1.7) [Democrat Party, centre-right]
Others: 4.0 (+2.1)

This poll represents the first time in eight years that the governing AK Party has lost the lead in SONAR polling. The source of the CHP bounce is, of course, largely the rise of Mr Kılıçdaroğlu to the leadership: the fieldwork was done in the five days immediately following his election. A new face at the head of a major political party means increased media coverage at the expense of the governing party, and a general sense of change and optimism.

On a crude and entirely unscientific swing, assuming the 10 percent electoral threshold is not lowered and the pro-Kurdish BDP's 20 MPs decide to run again as independents, this poll would roughly produce the following seat distribution in parliament (with changes from the present situation):

CHP: 209 seats (+110)
AK Party: 201 seats (-135)
MHP: 120 seats (+51)
BDP: 20 seats (no change)

Were a general election to produce this result, this would be firm coalition territory for Turkey. CHP and AK would be near equals in parliament, both requiring the support of the nationalist MHP to form a government. It's disconcertingly reminiscent of the 1970s, when CHP and the centre-right Justice Party were near-equal forces, and wholly dependent on smaller parties to govern. Regardless, it's a striking change from the last opinion poll I looked at in January, which produced a clear AK lead just short of an overall majority.

SONAR are making much of the fact that it is the first time their polling has shown a CHP lead for eight years. While that is a remarkable achievement, there are some points of caution:

1. AK has also recorded an increase in support, albeit considerably smaller than that of CHP.

2. Voters are becoming polarised. It appears the anti-government vote - supporters of the MHP, the BDP and the centre-right DP - is rallying behind CHP, while the CHP's recent prominence has persuaded some supporters of the strongly Islamist SP to turn to the AK Party.

3. The difference between CHP and AK - 1.4% - is well within SONAR's margin of error of 1.7%, which suggests CHP's lead is still extremely slim, and that the poll could have produced a narrow AK Party lead.

There are other anomalies too. Support for the centre-left DSP has increased at a time when the centre-left appeared to be collecting around Mr Kılıçdaroğlu. Rahşan Ecevit, the DSP's founder, former stalwart and wife of the late prime minister Bülent, is among those to shift her loyalties to the CHP, which is why the DSP increase is interesting.

The large increase in support for other parties is partly down to SONAR no longer publishing the results for the far-right Great Union Party (BBP, 2.2% in January) separately.

Most important, however, is that this poll was conducted in its entirety before Israel stormed that Turkish ship carrying aid to Gaza. The response of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister, has been strongly endorsed by many Turks. As in most cases of international crisis, the opposition - including Mr Kılıçdaroğlu - have been sidelined into issuing mild statements of support. It will be interesting to see how that reflects into the next opinion poll.

SONAR interviewed 3000 people in towns and villages in 16 Turkish provinces between 24 and 27 May 2010. The full survey can be found here.

Thoughts on yesterday

2010-06-02T03:01:00.001+03:00

Reading back on my entry yesterday, I feel I should make clear how appalling I have found the events of the last 48 hours. Israel's attack was largely unprovoked and wholly disproportionate. It will ill-thought out and badly executed. It demonstrated again Israel's habit in recent years of blindly marching against the heed of the international community. It is a deeply troubling trend.

Turkish-Israeli relations are at the crux of this crisis. Turkish politicians are being most vocal on the international scene, the protests of Turkish people are drawing the most attention around the world, and it is the Turkish government who pushed for the Security Council and NATO to convene extraordinarily. My concern is, I believe, shared by level-headed people everywhere: I simply do not know where things will go from here.

A latent fury at Israel shows its ugly head in Turkey

2010-05-31T18:24:00.008+03:00

Israeli flags were burned in Istanbul, tens of thousands of Israeli tourists cancelled Turkish holiday reservations and a lawyer attempted to punch an Israeli cyclist off his bike today, as relations between the erstwhile allies plunged to depths not seen in decades.

It was sparked by Israel's interception of a flotilla of ships led by the Turkish Mavi Marmara more than twelve hours ago, but there is very little we know for certain beyond that. We know the Israel Defence Forces stormed the ships with commandos in the dead of the night, but we don't know precisely what happened on board, and who provoked whom. We know several people have died, largely Turkish citizens, but don't know how many. We also know that the Israeli government has been vocal in justifying its actions: the flotilla was warned, it was invited to dock at an Israeli port, weapons were concealed on board the ships, are among their claims.

The anger in Turkey is palpable. The interception came literally hours after seven Turkish soldiers were killed in an attack by PKK separatists on a navy base in İskenderun. But this morning's flotilla incident has done more than compound anger at that attack. A latent fury at Israel has shown its ugly head in Turkey.

It had been brewing for months, probably since Israel's Gaza offensive in January 2009. It was in response to this that Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stormed off stage at a debate with the Israeli president at the World Economic Forum, almost causing a diplomatic incident but generating much acclaim back home.

A year later, I expressed concern about how an actual diplomatic incident - involving a Turkish TV drama and the Israeli deputy foreign minister - indicated two worrying trends: first, a mutual lack of respect at the highest level of Turkish-Israeli relations, and second, the growing popular resentment of Israel in Turkish public opinion. "The episode has injected further tension into the already icy relationship," I wrote at the time.

The first trend has certainly deteriorated. Mr Erdoğan described this morning's operation as "an act of state terrorism". His deputy, Bülent Arınç, used a press conference to demand the immediate return of those members of crew being treated in Israeli hospitals - almost as if they were hostages. The Turkish ambassador to Tel Aviv has been recalled to Ankara for consultations for the second time this year. And Ahmet Davutoğlu, foreign minister, is in New York right now, preparing to table the matter at the UN Security Council. How far old friends can fall.

Things are also far worse in terms of the Turkish public's attitude to Israel. Most will now have seen pictures of the thousands who filled Istanbul's streets this afteroon. Flags were burnt; sections of the crowd shouted for retribution. Too often for comfort, the words "Israeli" and "Jew" were used interchangeably.

Turkish police today provided increased protection to the Israeli team at a cycle tour in Tekirdağ, in the country's northwest. The added measures seemed justified: a local lawyer sporting a Palestinian flag attempted to punch a passing Israeli cyclist off his bike. And the anger exists in reverse too: in a matter of hours today, tens of thousands of would-be Israeli tourists cancelled holiday reservations to towns in southwest Turkey.

Things are bad, far worse today than they were in January.

I don't think I need to get into culpability at this stage. The grainy mobile phone footage and limited Israeli army videos we have all seen so far tell their own story. Amos Harel, writing in Haaretz, makes the important point that the commandos themselves are not to blame, at least not as much as those who decided to launch the botched operation.

How can Turkish-Israeli relations be rebuilt from this?

(Image from guardian.co.uk)

Israel storms aid ship

2010-05-31T12:44:00.008+03:00

A few points on the storming by Israeli forces of a flotilla of ships led by the Turkish Mavi Marmara.

1 - In the last few minutes, Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç has told a press conference that Turkey has recalled its ambassador to Tel Aviv. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, he says, has called an extraordinary meeting of the UN Security Council. There are no plans as yet to send military forces to recover the Turkish ships, although Mr Arınç did call for the immediate repatriation of those people taken to Israel for medical treatment.

2 - The media was expecting this conflict. Al Jazeera has journalists on board the ship who filed after Israeli troops boarded. Pictures from the Doğan News Agency are being shown on news channels worldwide. The Israeli military was prepared too: it has released footage of a radio warning issued by the navy prior to their interception. This is attack was not surprise.

3 - The Chief Rabbinate of Turkey has said it shared "the public reaction this operation has created in our country and express our deep sorrow". Mr Arınç did not directly respond to reports that Israel has called for Turkish Jews to emigrate immediately to Israel. He simply said Turkish Jews are citizens of Turkey, and that was confident the protests outside the Israeli embassy and consulate in Ankara and Istanbul would not target the Jewish community.

4 - Bear in mind there were ships belonging to other countries in the fleet. One such country is Greece, where the Israeli ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Ministry.

5 - There is no word as yet from either Britain or the United States, but it is still very early in the morning in Washington.

Is drug smuggling a military offence?

2010-01-21T22:09:00.010+02:00

Just when we thought we'd seen enough of him, he's back. Haşim Kılıç, head of Turkey's Constitutional Court, made another appearance in front of television cameras to announce a decision. We hadn't seen him for all of two months, when he announced the closure of the Democratic Society Party (DTP).

Their latest decision is to repeal a recent, controversial AK party amendment to the constitution that paved the way for Turkish military personnel to be tried in civilian courts. It was a groundbreaking decision at the time, representing an unprecedented foray into military matters by a Turkish government.Support for the amendment was far from universal, however, and the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) immediately announced it was taking the change to the Constitutional Court. It is this CHP complaint that was resolved this evening.

The change boils down to one word in Turkish (my translations).

Original quotation: "...including a state of war or emergency, judgements relating to the duties of military tribunals remain reserved."

AK Party amendment: "...in the event of a state of war or emergency, judgements relating to the duties of military tribunals remain reserved."

The Constitutional Court this evening decided unanimously that "in the event of", which translates as one word ("halinde") in Turkish, should be struck off. But a majority - not a unanimity - took the further decision to scrap the words "state of war or emergency", which would leave us with:Constitutional Court version:

"...judgements relating to the duties of military tribunals remain reserved."

It's not clear this evening, but there are dozens of ongoing court cases that could be affected by this ruling, not least the investigation into the alleged would-be assassins of Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç.

CHP figures have welcomed the decision; AK ministers are more muted, but clearly disagree with it. Bekir Bozdağ, the head of AK's parliamentary group, was on NTV a moment ago asking: "is drug smuggling a military offence?" CHP spokesman Mustafa Özyürek said the law change was a rushed effort. "It was wrong," he said, "and now it has gone."

Rumours abound that this case will only serve to fast-track the AK government's plans for a new constitution. For the moment at least, it seems two separate legal systems will continue to run in parallel in Turkey.

Bombing mosques and war with Greece?

2010-01-21T12:56:00.001+02:00

Taraf yesterday began serialising what it calls the detailed plans for
a coup in 2003 under the leadership of Çetin Doğan, commander of the
first army.
Operation Mallet would have involved orchestrating the bombing of two
prominent Istanbul mosques during Friday prayers, provoking Greece
into shooting down a Turkish fighter jet over the Aegean Sea, and
forcing parliament to declare a nationwide state of emergency.

Said Commander Doğan has already called the plans "the product of
unsound minds". They are certainly colourful, and my initial reading
is that they are a little too much like a Valley of the Wolves
storyline to be entirely true.

Taraf (http://www.taraf.com.tr) today published its second day of
revelations, with the promise of more to come.

More from me here when I've had a chance to peruse things.

Have we forgotten already?

2010-01-19T19:43:00.006+02:00

For someone currently based in London, it is impossible to avoid coverage of the disaster that is continuing to unfold in Haiti. Radio and television here has frequent updates on the relief effort, while newspapers are urging everyone to make a donation.

What about coverage in Turkey, where the Haitian story should sound horribly familiar? Nomadic View makes the observation that coverage in the Turkish press has been limited, preoccupied instead with such matters as the Ayalon fracas.

The Turks are experienced at earthquake rescue, and some of the country's finest rescue workers have done some heroic things since arriving in Haiti a few days ago. However, it is the United States that is driving the aid and relief effort, and Nomad says that coverage of this point has been scant.

It is immensely difficult to explain the sensation of an earthquake to someone who has never been in one. Like most people in Turkey on Tuesday 17 August 1999, I was woken at 3.02am - when the walls of my seventh-floor flat began bobbing and revolving like a boat on stormy seas. We made our way downstairs in the dark to sit in the car and listen to the confused overnight radio presenter tell us that she had no idea how bad things were.

The mobile phone network was jammed; everyone, like us, was ringing relatives who lived closer to the epicentre. It is the sense of fear that is most difficult to describe, and is what Haitians will have felt too: fear of a great, faceless, brutish wave that destroys a way of life in mere seconds.

I was in Ankara for Turkey's earthquake, hours away from the epicentre, where the only earthquake-related casualty that night was the city's electricity supply. I will never forget how hauntingly bright the stars were in the sky that night.

Anatolia, the land mass upon which Turkey lies, is riddled with fault lines, and history has recorded hundreds of destructive earthquakes there. Istanbul, a city of 12 million, is particularly vulnerable, but so is the whole of Turkey's northwest, as the country learned so painfully on 17 August. The 7.6 magnitude earthquake that struck that morning officially killed 17 thousand, but an order was later quietly made for tens of thousands more bodybags. It remains Turkey's worst natural disaster.

Seismologists have been saying for the last six years that another tremor on the scale of 17 August can happen at any minute in Turkey's northwest. A parallel but rather low-key discussion in the press has been questioning Turkey's preparedness. But there has been some considerable planning, from determining high-priority roads to introducing stricter construction regulations. The Turkish Red Crescent ran an exercise in Istanbul in May last year, and schools in the area do now teach children to take refuge under their desks.

But critics say the campaign needs a much higher profile, and that everyone needs to be made aware of what to do, how to prepare and whether their homes are in a high-risk area. The problem, some say, is that people are inclined to forget painful memories rather too quickly.

Milliyet cover originally published Friday 20 August 1999. Available online at the Milliyet archive.

AK support down in latest GENAR poll

2010-01-16T14:02:00.002+02:00

GENAR's quarterly survey was published earlier this week. For national voting intentions, the headline percentages were (with changes from the previous quarter):

AK Party: 36.5 (-1) [Justice and Development Party, governing, religious conservative]
CHP : 22.9 (-1.8) [Republican People's Party, secular]
MHP : 18.8 (+1.3) [Nationalist Action Party, nationalist]
BDP : 7.1 (+0.5)* [Peace and Democracy Party, pro-Kurdish]
SP : 4.0 (-0.4) [Felicity Party, strongly Islamist]
Others : 10.8 (+1.5) [includes independents]

On a crude uniform swing, assuming the BDP's 20 MPs run as independents and retain their seats, this would translate into following seats in parliament (with changes from the present situation):

AK Party: 247 (-90)
CHP : 155 (+58)
MHP : 128 (+59)
BDP : 20 (NC)

Such a result in a general election would leave Turkey in coalition territory again: AK would not have enough seats to govern alone, but would need just a handful of seats (i.e. within the broad margin of error) to enter into coalition with BDP. CHP and MHP would also be able to form a government together with these figures, although the balance between these two would be much more evenly weighted.

Of course, the above paragraph is entirely hypothetical. It assumes many uncertain things: that the voting trend would be exactly the same nationwide; that the Democratic Left Party (DSP) would run on the CHP ticket, as it did in 2007; that BDP MPs would run as independents to overcome the 10 percent threshold, as they did in 2007; and that no other party members will try the BDP's tactic.

The election itself is still 18 months away, and there are a few things we know will happen before then. Abdüllatif Şener's Turkey Party has yet to make an emergence, while Mustafa Sarıgül's new centre-left movement has yet to mobilise. Political parties are transient things in Turkey, you never quite know how they come and go, but it seems pretty certain they will make some impact.

Support for the government's "democratic initiative" - that is, its policy of new rights and institutions for Kurdish citizens - appears to be strictly along party lines. While AK voters support the programme overwhelmingly - 63% - all opposition voters are overwhelmingly against: 87% of CHP, 89% of MHP and, interestingly, 68% of BDP supporters expressed the opinion that the initiative "would not succeed". Overall, 61% said they found it "not positive" or "not positive at all".

GENAR also asked about the government's parallel initiative towards Alevi citizens, which appears to find slightly greater support. AK voters were the only majority supporters again, albeit by a much narrower majority (52%). Opposition party voters ranged from a near-even split (BDP and Democrat Party voters, 48% and 46% in support respectively) to a strong rejection (CHP and MHP voters, 22% and 17% in support).

The survey also appears to suggest:

- The recently-merged Democrat Party has made little impact, polling just 2 percent (change from previous survey unknown).
- The nationalist vote has shifted towards MHP. The Great Union Party (BBP), a spin-off grouping that displays even more extreme right-wing tendencies than the MHP (if such a thing is possible), had done rather well by taking the town of Sivas in last year's local elections. GENAR's latest poll suggests support for the BBP has halved. In response to another question, nearly 10% gave MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli as their "favoured politician of 2009", placing him second only to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (27%) and ahead of CHP leader Deniz Baykal (8%).
- Abdüllatif Şener, leader of the low-profile Turkey Party, does have some limited recognition. He also featured on the "favoured politician of 2009" list. 1.5% of respondents mentioned him by name; a third of them were CHP supporters, more than any other party, even Mr Şener's former AK.
- Valley of the Wolves: Ambush, the programme at the centre of the past week's diplomatic spat with Israel, topped the list of favourite television dramas for 2009.
has nationalist vote. BBP got just 1.6 percent.

GENAR interviewed 2095 people in 17 Turkish provinces between 02 and 11 January 2010. The full survey can be found here. Figures compared with the defunct Democratic Society Party.*

Dangerous tantrums and casual antisemitism

2010-01-14T20:08:00.002+02:00

Such was the anger of Israeli deputy foreign minister Daniel Ayalon that he decided to pull a bit of a stunt. To demonstrate his disapproval of the portrayal of Israelis in a dodgy drama on Turkish television, he summoned the Turkish ambassador to Tel Aviv to his office. He deliberately kept the ambassador waiting in the corridor, in full and awkward view of the waiting cameras. Once ushered inside, the ambassador was seated on a low sofa while ministry officials towered over him opposite. Placed on the coffee table between them was a solitary Israeli flag – no Turkish one alongside it, contrary to diplomatic convention. All done to implicitly shame the ambassador and convey the displeasure of his hosts over a certain issue.

Done well, a rebuke of this kind can be rather effective. But Mr Ayalon got it wrong. His departure from subtlety – he pointed out the height difference and absent flag to the gathered reporters – was where his rebuke became an insult. Israeli television carried the footage on Tuesday; nearly every Turkish newspaper carried Mr Ayalon’s behaviour on their front pages on Wednesday morning. All, from the fiery Vatan to the level-headed Radikal, were outraged.

Mr Ayalon used to be Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, a man not unfamiliar with the subtleties of diplomatic protocol. He is also a masterful performer: when I saw him speak at the London School of Economics last October, he was placid in the face of the loud abuse he received from pro-Palestinian members of the audience. The heckling prevented any reasonable debate, which also helped him disguised his more controversial policies. Why he got it quite so wrong with the Turkish ambassador is a mystery to me.

The television programme, Valley of the Wolves: Ambush is a lowbrow mafia drama, popular for its protagonist Polat Alemdar, a gun-wielding secret service agent fueled by a love for his country and no small amount of testosterone.

The offending episode, broadcast in December, shows him infiltrating the Israeli embassy, where Mossad agents are holding a Turkish child they’ve abducted to take back to Israel and convert to Judaism. The perpetrator, surrounded, takes the child hostage, but is killed by a bullet through the head. Blood splatters onto the Israeli flag hung conveniently on the wall behind him. The impact of the crucial blood-on-flag moment was lessened somewhat by an on-screen advertisement encourage viewers to download the series’s background music on their mobile phones.

In principle, the diplomatic summons was entirely reasonable. Had it been Israeli television showing Turkish agents abducting children and having their blood splattered on the Turkish flag, the Israeli ambassador to Ankara would have been summoned to have his knuckles rapped in quite the same way. In practice, however, the episode has injected further tension into the already icy relationship between Turkey and Israel.

There are two causes for concern:

Firstly, the degenerating relationship between the countries is not a good thing, neither for Israel, nor for the Middle East process, nor for Turkey's newfound courage as an emerging regional power. Reports suggest Turkey was previously very close to brokering a peace between Israel and Syria; Israel now refuses to accept Turkey as a mediator.

Second, Turkey's increasingly anti-Israel tone is driven to largely by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The current mood began with Israel's attack on Gaza last year and the Turkish prime minister's infamous walkout from a debate on the situation during the Davos Economic Summit. Mr Erdoğan exchanged harsh words with Mr Peres during that debate, has been outspoken on Israeli actions ever since, and has led Turkey into closer ties with Iran, Lebanon and Syria.

But there is more to Turkey's Israeli stance than Mr Erdoğan's views. Last year the director of a culture association in Eskişehir attracted headlines when he placed a notice outside his centre that read "Dogs are free to enter this building" above another: "Jews and Armenians may not enter." The director said his move was in response to an Armenian citizen who allegedly hung a similar notice on his door banning dogs and Turks. What was worrying about the incident was that the director's decision to include the word "Jew" appeared to be unprovoked.

The Valley of the Wolves episode is another such incident that appears to indicate latent feelings of casual antisemitism are becoming more prominent in certain sections of Turkish society. Most Turks would be horrified at the idea of insulting members of another faith - indeed, Mr Erdoğan himself criticised the Eskişehir director and said it was wrong for "one group of citizens in this country to stand up and provoke another group of citizens." But in a society where high profile Jews are few and far in between, and where ordinary Jews keep a low profile, such antisemitism does go unchallenged.

Haven't you missed the boat?

2009-10-31T21:23:00.003+02:00

Today was really just a formality. Almost a quarter century after Turgut Özal tore his loyalties away from Süleyman Demirel, the prime minister unseated by Turkey's 1980 coup, and formed a party of his own, a reconciliation is now official. Neither man was there to witness the reunion – Özal died in 1993, while the elderly Mr Demirel is in retirement – but a huge photograph of the two in thoughtful conversation looked down on delegates from both parties gathered to seal the deal. Today those delegates voted to abolish Özal’s Motherland (Anavatan) party and transfer all its assets to the Democrat Party (DP), successor to an outfit established by Mr Demirel.

Party leader Hüsamettin Cindoruk hailed it as a momentous event, the long-awaited reunion of the Turkish centre-right. The former claim might be true, but the latter is doubtful.

There was little love lost between Turgut Özal and Süleyman Demirel. Özal was a member of Mr Demirel’s Justice Party (AP) in the 1970s, and was catapulted into the transitional government established after the military coup of 12 September 1980. He was handed responsibility for reviving Turkey's shattered economy, a role that gave him broad recognition in a country suddenly bereft of civilian politicians. Özal benefited from this new-found profile, and from Mr Demirel’s ban from politics, to establish Motherland and soundly win the first post-coup election in 1983. He repeated the success in 1987. Many Demirelites still regard his defection as treason.

When his ban was lifted in 1987, Mr Demirel did not join his former deputy but took the helm of the True Path Party (DYP) and established himself in opposition. There was little policy difference to separate the two centre-right parties, so the divide became one over personalities. Far from serving together in government, they became occupied with slandering each other, and would often refuse to support the other’s policy simply because of who proposed it. It was a bitter separation that defined Turkish politics in the 1990s and helped turn conservative Turkish voters to more overtly religious parties. Anavatan never won another election after Mr Demirel’s return to politics; neither did the DYP after Mr Demirel became president. Both parties failed to cross the 10 percent electoral threshold in 2002 and became rump outsiders.

It is significant, of course, that these two parties have finally come together. But it has happened after so many missed opportunities: 1987, after Mr Demirel’s return; 1993, after Özal’s death; 2002, when both parties were curtly dismissed by voters; and particularly 2007, when a resurgent Motherland under Erkan Mumcu could have helped elect Turkey’s next president and thus dictated the terms of the merger. Mr Mumcu chose to boycott the presidential vote. His subsequent opinion polls were so low he didn’t even bother to contest the subsequent general election.

This new emboldened Democrat Party is far from unifying the centre-right. For one, it is spectacularly unpopular: SONAR opinion poll in today’s Cumhuriyet suggests less than two percent of Turks would vote for it. Perhaps more importantly, there are other parties that claim the centre-right crown. The governing AK party’s founder members include many former DYP and Motherland heavyweights. One of them, Abdullatif Sener, has since separated to form a non-descript party of his own, the Turkey Party. The centre-right is as crowded as ever before.

Speaking this afternoon, Mr Cindoruk made the populist move of slamming the AK party’s Kurdish policy. But interestingly, and in contrast to the opposition parties in parliament, he also called for the government to revive its plans for a new constitution, one that has not been drafted by the army. The question is whether he will keep to that line, and whether he anyone will hear him.

He's going

2008-09-04T01:38:00.003+03:00

A statement on the Turkish president's website published late this evening has confirmed that Abdullah Gül will be going to Yerevan this Saturday.

"Beyond being a sporting fixture," the statement says, "this match presents us with important opportunities. Especially in these times, when regional developments are causing worry among the people of the Caucasus, it is believed that all sides should appraise this opportunity in the best possible manner. It is thought that a visit on the occasion of this match could contribute to developing a climate of friendship. It is with this understanding that the president has accepted the invitation."

And quite right too. Well done.

Read my entry on this from yesterday here.

Go and watch some football

2008-09-02T23:46:00.011+03:00

Saturday marks the return of international football in Europe after an interval of almost three months, as 53 teams begin to compete for thirteen spaces at the next World Cup in 2010. Turkey is in Group 5, and it has long been clear that its single greatest opponent will be Spain, the reigning European champions. But it was another fixture that everyone noticed when the group was drawn last November: Turkey versus Armenia.

Turkey will play ten qualification matches over the course of the next twelve months, and the first and last of these will be against Armenia. In footballing terms, it shouldn't be much of a contest: Turkey is a very strong side, ranking 13th in the world, while Armenia trails at number 94. Expect the Turks to win; anything less than a draw would be a great upset.

But it isn't just about football that Turkey's media is talking about this week. Also being debated - fiercely at times - is whether or not President Abdullah Gül should accept an invitation from his Armenian counterpart, Serzh Sargsyan, to watch Saturday's game in Yerevan together.

To describe Armenians and Turks as "having a history" is to vastly downplay what they have been through. The two are intertwined - or were, until around a 150 years ago - having lived alongside each other within the Ottoman Empire. Armenians, as Christians, had a privileged minority status and held many an influential position in the Ottoman civil service, particularly in the Empire's latter years. In fact, it was sometimes difficult to describe them as a minority: in many parts of Anatolia that are now Eastern Turkey, for instance, the number of Armenians almost equalled the number of Turks. This was the case as recently as the beginning of the First World War.

Of course, something happened to change that, because the number of Armenians living in Turkey today wouldn't fill a small town. That something remains deeply controversial both in Turkey (as in January last year) and abroad (see here and here for background). And it isn't just claims of genocide that have led to today's tension between the two countries. Armenia and Azerbaijan, a close Turkish partner, are still technically at war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, and Turkey closed its border with Armenia over the issue more than a decade ago.

With so many factors to consider, Mr Gül has yet to RSVP. A delegation from the Turkish foreign ministry is in Yerevan this week to invite Armenia to join Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's plans for a Caucasus Alliance, but they are also there to discuss the potential visit too, and Mr Gül has said his decision will be announced after the delegation reports back.

There has been plenty of opinion from inside Turkey as to whether he should go, with the opposition being, well, rather opposed. Atilla Kaya, deputy leader of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), said Armenia "does not recognise the territorial integrity of the Turkish Republic you represent. It also occupies another Turkic territory. I call on you not to go to Armenia." Main opposition leader Deniz Baykal agrees, saying Mr Gül should recognise Turkey's friend in the region is Baku, not Yerevan.

Neither is there much enthusiasm from the ruling AK party. At its parliamentary assembly on Monday, AK MPs voted not to send representatives to accompany Mr Gül, should he decide to go. It looks like it would be a very lonely visit.

If he did accept, Mr Gül's visit would be fleeting. There are no diplomatic relations between the two countries, which means that, far from an official welcoming ceremony at Yerevan's Zvartnots airport, Mr Gül would land, travel directly to the stadium, watch the match, and then leave. Any discussions with Mr Sargsyan - and surely they would be superficial - would occur during the match. The engines on Mr Gül's aircraft would not even be switched off in the interim (carbon footprint, anyone?). This visit would hardly open the border tomorrow.

But that is no reason to turn the invitation down and happily, there are some in Turkey who agree. The influential Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association, TUSİAD, has urged Mr Gül to accept, saying that in the present climate of tension elsewhere in the Caucasus, any opportunity to improve relations should be taken.

And quite right too. The Armenian president's invitation is an immense gesture and the perfect first meeting for further talks later on. It would not estrange Azerbaijan overnight, nor would it be a betrayal of the position Turkey took on the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. All the visit would demonstrate is that both sides are ready to talk. And seasoned observers know that alone would be a remarkable step forward.

A step back from the brink

2008-07-31T01:34:00.002+03:00

They must be exhausted, and it is easy to understand why: the eleven judges who sit on the Constitutional Court only met on Monday to begin deliberating over the chief prosecutor's case to close the ruling AK party. Their decision was announced at six o'clock this evening, meaning that the judges squeezed a week-and-a-half's work into just three days. They met at 9.30am each morning, and did not adjourn for the night until 10.30pm. Even the most optimistic press reports were not predicting a result until Friday.

But it is a reflection of how pivotal this case had become for Turkey that the ruling came so quickly. Court chairman Haşim Kılıç looked visibly tired, bags swinging under his eyes, when he appeared in front of a horde of journalists at six o'clock his evening. He was then prompty bathed in white light as every camera flash in the room went off at once. He had to ask the reporters to stop taking his picture before reading out the decision: six judges - a majority - voted to close Turkey's ruling AK party, four voted to impose financial sanctions, and one voted to dismiss all charges.

Seven votes were needed for closure, a threshold which was not met. The results mean the Constutional Court has accepted, albeit not unanimously, to cut AK's funding. The ruling party will receive only half of its funding this year; the precise figure will be determined when the Budget for 2009 is accepted.

It was so agonisingly close. The deciding vote, if there was such a thing, was probably cast by Mr Kılıç himself, who revealed he was the only one who voted to dismiss the charges. It would have taken just a single judge voting the other way to have brought a decision to close, and put the country into the unprecedented position of bringing down an overwhelmingly popular governing party in an instant. But that is not what happened. The AK Party remains open, its politicians remain unbanned, and the Turkish lira even managed to climb a kuruş or two against the dollar this evening.

AK supporters were naturally delighted. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was greeted with footall chants when he emerged to make a statement at party HQ. He said the decision had lifted away a great uncertainty in Turkey, and reiterated his commitment to European values: "Our path is that towards the EU. There is no return."

He avoided commenting explicitly on the outcome because, as is standard procedure in such cases, the judges' reasons for their decision has not yet been published. But while it is true that their response to Chief Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya's charges will make interesting reading, it is pretty clear what their decision says already: the AK party has been deemed to have behaved in an unsecular manner, but not to so violent a degree that it merits closure.

This is the best result any of us could have hoped for. The Court has demonstrated that Turkey's political system is not necessarily inflexible and compatible only with parties that are militantly secular. There is room for diversity here. At the same time, it has warned that such diversity can only go so far, and that the AK Party has seriously pushed the limits of the secular system. This is more than a slap on the wrists; it is a demand for the government to change its ways.

So what next for Mr Erdoğan's party? The ruling should hopefully subside some of the arrogance and complacence with which it has approached the business of government, particularly since its phenomenal electoral victory last summer. It is true that AK has a very powerful mandate, but it certainly does not have a universal one, and it would do well to remember that more often. Its approach to the recent headscarf debacle was a telling example: having secured the support of the opposition Nationalist Action Party, AK proceded to draft its own law without consulting secularist parties, non-governmental organisations or - heaven forbid - women, and passed it easily in parliament. The law was promptly annulled by the same Constitutional Court that today voted to keep the party open. In matters as controversial as the headscarf, AK must recognise that to govern does not necessarily mean to impose; it can also mean to consult.

That, however, is for the future. Tonight, Turkey takes a step back from the brink. Things could have been a lot worse.

More from me, more from Turkey

2008-05-27T20:55:00.001+03:00

Thank you to everyone for the kind comments you left both on this blog and in my inbox. I spent the last few months writing a rather taxing research dissertation about Turkey's position on the Armenian genocide and had little time to keep anything else going. This is now complete and I am duly posting here once again. I do enjoy keeping this blog and intend to continue with a greater degree regularity in the future. But having not posted since February, that could mean anything...

Times have been turbulent in Turkish politics during my absence. The most striking development has been a case, by no less than the chief prosecutor, to close the ruling AK Party, on charges of not being secular enough. It calls for 71 members of the party, including prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and President Abdullah Gül, to be banned from politics.

The AK Party's predecessors, Welfare and Virtue (RP and FP, respectively), were themselves closed down by the Constitutional Court in similar circumstances; the charge here is that AK is merely their continuation. But many have expressed disappointment at the prosecutor's case, as it appears to hinge largely on the public speeches made by those 71 implicated leaders and less on, for instance, evidence of non-secular AK legislation.

AK was the moderate half of a split that occurred following the FP's closure. The other half, which became the Felicity Party (SP), is pious, xenophobic and not very popular. It won just two percent of the vote in last year's election; AK won forty-six percent. It was the SP that was behind protests against Pope Benedict's visit in 2006, where "he's coming to resurrect Byzantium" was the bizarre rallying call. The SP has also organised similar protests denouncing such targets as Israel and the Danish cartoonists who depicted the Prophet Muhammad. Mr Erdoğan met the Pope, was only the second Turkish prime minister to visit Israel, and stayed sensibly quiet on the cartoon issue. You would think it would be the SP, not AK, that is targeted in an anti-secular lawsuit.

This leads commentators, including this blog, to conclude what everyone in Turkey already knows: that the chief prosecutor's case is about more than AK's overtly religious behaviour, of which there is scant evidence. The lawsuit reflects an ever-growing concern in Turkey that while AK might not be staunchly Islamist, it certainly is not staunchly secularist either.

In some areas of Turkey, fewer and fewer restaurants are granted licences to serve alcohol, and there has been recurent talk of creating "alcohol zones" in towns and cities and prohibiting licenced establishments outside of them. Many Turks also say more girls than before sport the Muslim headscarf and that this is noticeable in cities as western-orientated as Istanbul. There is little doubt that AK's six years in power has bolstered confidence among Turkish Muslims; many say the lawsuit is a reaction to that.

Photographs such as the above, of First Lady Hayrünnisa Gül and Queen Elizabeth at a state banquet in Ankara earlier this month, are a firm confirmation that times have changed in Turkey. The Queen last visited Turkey in 1971, not long after the country's second military intervention, when it would be unthinkable for the First Lady to have her head covered. It would have been unthinkable this time last year. But Mrs Gül accompanied the Queen throughout the four-day visit. Yes, things have changed.

Whether the lawsuit will be successful is unclear. AK originally planned to change a part of the constitution to render the case illegal, but the idea found little support among the opposition and has since been dropped. AK will now defend itself against the charges in court, but Mr Erdoğan is also rumoured to be arranging a successor party in case he loses. He has also been involved in a fiery and very public argument between the government and the judiciary. Those clashes will continue for sometime yet, both inside and outside the courtroom.

Why, oh why, could anyone possibly think that this is a good idea?

2008-05-14T18:01:00.006+03:00

Part of the government in Britain, where I appear to be invariably based at the moment, seems obsessed with dispensing with its prime minister after less than a year in the job. "We're not popular, we'll probably lose the next election, it's not working out for us," they mutter behind closed doors, before adding: "Off with his head and bring in a new one." Or something to that effect.

The instinct in Turkey is precisely the opposite. When things go wrong, the prevailing mood is one of either stagnation or regression. Stagnation is the case with the Republican People's Party (CHP), which recently re-elected its directionless leader, unopposed, in an appalling example of democracy (see my outdated entry on the CHP for some back story). Regression appears to be what is happening to the Democrat Party (DP), which is trying to bring back its former leader and last prime minister, Tansu Çiller.

Mrs Çiller assumed the vacant post of prime minister in 1993, after Süleyman Demirel moved up to the presidency. She wasn't particularly high-ranking - a mere state minister, certainly not senior in the cabinet - and she contested her party's leadership against such heavyweights as İsmet Sezgin and Köksal Toptan. Her victory was credited largely to Turkey's media, including the fledgling private television channels, which made much of the idea of a first woman prime minister.

If you asked her what her greatest achievement in office was, she would probably tell you it was that Turkey entered a Customs Union with the European Union under her watch. Or that the military's funding was stepped up to combat the mounting PKK threat. She wouldn't be one to talk of the banking crisis of the early 1990s, her alleged corrupt practices (including tenders that favoured her wealthy businessman husband), or the fact that she never won a election.

Mrs Çiller was a staggeringly ineffective leader. Under her, the party won a successively smaller share of the vote, finally failing to cross the electoral threshold in 2002. Her first election, in 1995, saw her lose to Necmettin Erbakan's Welfare Party (RP). It was a shock to Turkey's secular establishment for the overtly religious RP to do so well; what shocked them more was Mrs Çiller joining them in coalition. During the campaign, she had declared Mr Erbkaban "a smuggler of heroin" and herself "the safeguard of secularism", but after six months and a hefty libel fee the two leaders were in a "power rotating" scheme whereby Mr Erbakan would be prime minister first, and Mrs Çiller would follow in a year-and-a-half.

She stood silent as her senior partner spurned the west and made highly publicised visits to Iran and Libya. She was genuinely surprised, upon Mr Erbakan's resignation, not to be asked to form the next government. She was not a good leader, and now her old rump party wants her back.

To bring back a former, supposedly succesful leader is a delusional byword for political recovery in Turkey. Party leaders are effectively sanctified in the country - most party conventions, for instance, will feature large portraits of both Atatürk and the present leader - and they are a rallying point for genuine enthusiasm and unwavering loyalty. During a recent parliamentary debate on smoking bans, one Nationalist Action Party (MHP) MP spoke passionately about the charismatic style with which his leader, Devlet Bahçeli, could hold and smoke a cigarette. He was probably not even planted.

This near-blind degree of loyalty makes it somewhat easier to understand why Turkish parties tend not to blame their leaders for electoral failure. But it is still delusional: parties don't to recognise it even when the public have had enough of them. In the 1999 elections, having failed to cross the ten percent threshold to win seats in parliament, Mr Baykal resigned. It was widely hailed as an act of political maturity, but he was back in just six months. Mr Bahçeli, Mrs Çiller and Motherland Party leader Mesut Yılmaz all made similar pledges when their parties failed to cross the threshold in 2002; with this latest offer to Mrs Çiller, all have now returned to politics.

Turks have a long tradition of sanctifying their leaders. Any tourist to Turkey will tell you Kemal Atatürk is an obvious example, but it applies to more recent leaders too: the late Bülent Ecevit ousted CHP leader and War of Independence veteran Ismet İnönü in 1973. İnönü had been leader for thirty-five years, and Ecevit was widely credited with ending what was effectively a theocracy. But that same cult of personality came to apply to Ecevit, and it would be twenty-nine years before he was toppled himself.

Few outside the DP will celebrate Mrs Çiller's return. It will do little for the party's electability, as its traditional centre-right base has long been subsumed by the ruling AK Party. But it does have wider implications for Turkish politics: a year ago, I wrote that AK's electoral victory, while welcome, urgently needed to be balanced by an effective opposition. With stagnation in the CHP and regression in the DP, it does not appear to be happening. And that is not good for Turkey.

In they march

2008-02-23T12:24:00.008+02:00

This is the photo that is splashed across the front of nearly every Turkish newspaper this morning. Released on the Turkish Armed Forces website, it shows troops marching over the snowy border into Iraq. There are reported to be another ten thousand of them.

Newspapers outside Turkey have been covering it too. This morning's Independent called it "the new invasion of Iraq ... it threatens to destabilise the country's only peaceful region". It is indeed, as The Times says, Turkey's biggest incursion into the country for more than a decade. And as Radikal points out, the operation is taking place under "assurances" from Ankara and "understanding" from the rest of the world. No major political leader - not even the Iraqi president, himself a Kurd - has called this an illegal invasion.

Details of what is happening remain sketchy. The terrain is mountainous, temperatures are subzero, and the constant exchange of fire means there are no independent reporters in the region. All we have is what the Turkish army and sources close to the PKK tell us and, perhaps predictably, the information conflicts. The Turks say five of its troops have been killed in action, the PKK puts that figure at twenty. The Turks say they've killed 24 fighters, the PKK says it has no losses. Who to believe?

Alone in its opposition to the incursion was Birgün, which carried the headline "No! - to war, to conditions of war, to the noise of war". It says the land operation will "affect our side of the border more than it does the other. The powers of peace and democracy are wary for young lives and the spirirt of living among one another." There is, in this, a message that is conceded even by Turkish generals: Turkey's Kurdish problem cannot be solved purely by military means.

Murat Yetkin writes in today's Radikal that the time is right to take measures "other than military steps, to take political, legal and economic steps to combat those conditions that create the PKK." Iraqi president Jalal Talabani was invited yesterday to Ankara, he says, with this in mind. This diplomacy is perhaps more important than the strikes.

Turkey has so far been playing this effectively, and by the book. The current operation is expected to last a fortnight; there might be more to follow in the coming months. But it is vital not to lose perspective, and ensure that any solution is a lasting one. Diplomacy and reform is the way to do it.

A moment of hope for Cyprus

2008-02-18T02:52:00.003+02:00

On a day when the world was more occupied by more momentous events in another part of Europe, there has been a subtle change on the island of Cyprus.

The Greek, southern, internationally recognised part of the island was holding presidential elections that would effectively determine the next five years of relations with the north. The incumbent running for re-election, Tassos Papadopoulos, was by no means a shoo-in, but he was leading all the opinion polls. They turned out to be wrong - Mr Papadopoulos came third in today's vote and failed to progress to next week's run-off.

Greek Cypriots will choose next Sunday between Ioannis Kasoulides, a former foreign minister, and Demetris Christophias, leader of the communist AKEL party. Both have said they want to restart talks with the Turkish north, after negotiations stalled in the latter years of the Papadopoulos administration.

The precise policy of the eventual winner will not be clear for a while. Just 900 votes separated Mr Kasoulides and Mr Chirstophias today; as both will be courting Mr Papadopoulos's supporters over the coming week, neither is likely to detail their plans for talks or reunification. But it is an encouraging result. Turnout was very high - at almost 90 percent - and more than two-thirds voted for the top two candidates, which shows that Greek Cypriot voters strongly favour a more conciliatory approach to the Cyprus problem.

What is certain is that Mr Papadopoulos will not be Cypriot president come next week. He is no loss. He was a source of frustration not just for leaders in Turkey, who found EU accession chapters suspended on his insistence, but also for leaders in Europe, who felt betrayed by his opposition to the Annan plan for Cypriot reunification in 2004. His pledges for a second term offered little change from this approach, and Cypriot voters have now told him what they think of them.

Headscarves at universities

2008-02-09T12:31:00.000+02:00

As I write, a second round of voting is underway in Turkey for the easing of the headscarf ban in universities. The bill has the support of the governing Justice and Development (AK) and opposition Nationalist Action (MHP) parties. It will pass, just like a first round did earlier in the week. The real question is what happens next.

Normal procedure is for laws such as this - a constitutional ammendment - to be taken directly to the president, Abdullah Gül, who can either approve it or exercise his one-time veto. It won't be that simple this time, because the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) says it will take the bill to the Constitutional Court, arguing the bill itself infringes the constitution. Once again we return to a situation where a panel of judges hold a remarkable say over a major political issue.

But is it a political issue? The protestors gathered outside parliament today certainly think so. The MPs voting inside the chamber certainly think so. But we're talking here about relaxing a ban on a choice of clothing that prevents a group of women from attending university - it is surely a social question too.

To isolate the matter for just one moment: there should be no question of whether women should be allowed to wear their headscarves at university. If it represents a personal faith, it should be no obstacle to education. But like so many things in Turkey, this is a highly symbolic issue, and secularists say it goes to the root of everything Turkey stands for.

There is no doubt that secularism has made Turkey unique. From an empire that even at its weakest was the indisputed leader of the Islamic world, it was transformed into a nationalist republic, its religious element entirely removed, and set firmly on a westward course. The Turkey of today is an official candidate for EU membership. Never before has a country so predominantly Muslim been this close to a group of countries that so predominantly are not. There is no other country in the world like it, and secularists are rightly proud of that.

But for all its benefits, Turkish secularism does not help illuminate the boundary where public life ends and personal life begins. Universities represent part of that boundary: are they public spaces that should be religion-neutral, or centres of learning where personal faith is irrelevant?

Many headscarf-wearing women do, it is true, attend university. While some fumble with wigs, others just remove the scarf before entering the classrom and put it back on immediately after leaving. There was even talk last summer of lecturers at Sabancı University in Istanbul who cast a blind eye at those who sport it.

Two major issues that exist in Turkey have been exposed by this latest debate. They are issues that will not be resolved anytime soon.

The first is the secular structure itself. Many in Turkey would have you believe that secularism is the country's most important principle. It supercedes everything else, they say, including democracy if necessary. The army chief, Yaşar Büyükanıt, frequently warns that "secularism is becoming a matter for debate", implicitly suggesting that it shouldn't be. He is wrong.

Turkey's secularism is not sanctified, it should be justified. The concept of keeping apart mosque and state should be explored and debated, not committed to memory in endless platitudes. Part of the reason for hawkish generals and Ataturk statues is an intrinsic fear that the system could be lost. The way to prevent that is to talk about it rather than defend it with a gun.

The second issue is the oil-and-water manner in which politicians operate in Turkey. Today's response to the long-running headscarf debate has been typically Turkish: a decree from above is made, and those below are left to sort out the details. There was a small cry that the AK-MHP committee putting together the bill contained not one woman, but then again, there isn't a single woman MP in parliament who wears a headscarf. There couldn't be.

What politicians in this country have yet to understand is that social politics involves actually talking to those people whose lives you intend to change. This would mean public consultations, campus debates with ministers, perhaps even a televised seminar or two attended by the prime minister - the kind of thing at which European hearts beat a little faster. Mr Erdoğan himself attended a meeting with Turkish students and German chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin yesterday. He looked uncomfortable, but he was there. He wouldn't do the same thing in Turkey.

A crash course in Turkey's headscarf debate

2008-01-30T14:26:00.000+02:00

Not for the first time in recent Turkish politics, the headscarf is all anyone can talk about. That piece of fabric that Muslim women use to wrap around their heads has been banned in universities and public buildings de jure since 1980, and de facto since 1997, meaning that Turkish women wearing it are not allowed to work in most civil service positions. Many, including the president's wife, were given a place at university but were unable to go because of the headwear.

The issue has been raised very often over the last decade, in particular since the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK) came to power in 2002. But for all the fierce political debate, there have been few attempts to find a political solution. That is, until a couple of weeks ago, when one party took the initiative. Perhaps surprisingly, it was not AK who piped up. If they had, it surely would have triggered accusations of a hidden Islamic agenda faster than it takes to wrap a headscarf.

No, it was Devlet Bahçeli and his right wing Nationalist and Action Party (MHP) who first said some arrangement had to be made. AK officials jumped at the opportunity and now, two weeks later, we have a bill that would lift the ban on wearing the most basic form of headscarf in Turkish universities.

The changes involve modifying two articles of the constitution, which concern equality before the law and the rights to education, to say that no person shall be deprived of an education except for reasons openly laid out in the law. There is a more explicit revision to the law for higher education, which says: "No-one shall be deprived of their right to higher education because their head is covered, nor can any enforcement or arrangement be made in this regard. However, the covering of the head must leave the face open and allow for the person to be identified, and must be tied beneath the chin."

Voting takes place in parliament at the end of next week. Together, AK and MHP have enough of a majority to pass the bill through, although they have been lobbying the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) and the small left wing DSP to come on board. The CHP's Hakkı Suha Okay described the proposal as "insufficient", and added, somewhat bizarrely, that the AK and MHP had clearly not come to any consensus on how to solve the problem. He also confirmed a return to their tactics of last spring, saying that they would fulfil their duty of opposition by challenging the bill in the Supreme Court, after it passes. The DSP were a little more cooperative, refraining from comment until they had reviewed the proposal.

The process is by no means over - President Abdullah Gül has hinted at putting the matter to referendum even if the bill passes, and there is little appetite for that in any party - but it is nevertheless encouraging that the matter is being discussed, the CHP's guerilla threats aside, in such a mature manner.

The Turkish headscarf debate is complicated by the fact that there are more styles than just the loose headscarf and the full veil. Under the new arrangement, Mr Gül's wife, Hayrünnisa (pictured at the start of this article), would still not be permitted to enroll at a university, because her choice of headscarf covers the neck. Rather, it will be the so-called "traditional" style of headscarf that is permitted. No-one knows precisely what that is, although some media outlets have dubbed it the "grandmother headscarf", in reference to what is predominant among Turkey's OAPs.

A firm definition of what separates a headscarf (başörtü) from what Mrs Gül is wearing will not be decided until later. How, for instance, should the headscarf be tied under the chin: in a knot, as is popular in the countryside or in the home, or with a special kind of pin, which is more widespread in the cities and tightens the scarf around the face?

The word "secularist" in Turkey is a collective term that tends to refer to the Turkish state, the CHP, and the army, although definitions vary (the MHP would describe itself as 'secularist' too - but then again, so would AK). These secularists argue, with some degree of justification, that the headscarf has become a symbol of political Islam. They point to the fact that some women attend university wearing wigs over their headscarves which makes it not a symbol of faith but a blatant protest. CHP leader Deniz Baykal YESTERDAY described it as a "foreign uniform" and the entire issue as "an incident provoked from outside the country, an Arab symbol targetting the secular Turkish republic."

Part of the secularist position is that the whole point of a Muslim headscarf is to conceal a woman's beauty, rather than becoming an accessory for it. Why, they ask, is there a whole industry in headscarf fashion (see right)? They say the whole concept is paradoxical and only reinforces the argument that it is a political symbol.

There is also the open-ended question of where it will all end. Now that the first lady sports a headscarf, and universities might be permitting them, there is a fear that the next step will only further dismantle Atatürk's legacy.

That doesn't seem likely at the moment. Government spokesman Cemil Çiçek told this morning's Hürriyet in the clearest terms I have ever seen him speak that the restriction would be lifted solely for universities, and not for public offices or primary and secondary schools. He said the permitted headscarf would be tied beneath the chin, and revealed that they were even thinking of attaching photographs of a regulation headscarf to the law.

There is a lot of scaremongering going on, and Radikal's front page today played very effectively on it by modifying Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream" to wear a headscarf, under the headline "Republic of fear". With the army openly opposed, AK are being very careful. But in this ruling, they might succeed.

Headscarf photos from here, here, here and here.

What was the point?

2008-01-29T17:38:00.000+02:00

Before and after: this is what Cardiff's memorial to the Armenian victims of 1915 now looks like. It had been unveiled at a ceremony I attended in November, to the accompaniment of noisy Turkish protests. At the time, I wrote there had been "no incursion into the temple, nor any attempt to reach or deface the memorial."

It appears the cross on the khatchkar was smashed off the stone with a hammer on Saturday night, before a ceremony the following morning to mark Britain's Holocaust Memorial Day. The damaged cross were abandoned at the scene, and has been taken away for prints. There is a police investigation underway, although it appears the nearest CCTV cameras were pointing in the wrong direction at the time.

The Wales-Armenia Solidarity group called it "a despicable racist attack" and called on the British government and the Turkish Embassy to condemn it. Eilian Williams, from the society, said he blamed Hal Savaş and his Committee for the Protection of Turkish Rights, who organised the Turkish protest at the November unveiling.

A press officer at the Turkish Embassy in London, who would not give me his name, told me he had seen the story carried in some Turkish newspapers today, but had no comment of his own to make. When pressured on whether it was a regrettable incident in terms of Turkish-Armenian relations, he said: "We think it is regrettable that there was a memorial built there in the first place."

Stephen Thomas, director at the Temple of Peace where the memorial is based, said Sunday's service "wasn’t specific to the Armenians", but it featured a reading to mark the assassination of Hrant Dink. The first anniversary of his death was the previous weekend, and there were tense protests in Istanbul for it.

It was an ugly attack and surely took any wind out of the Turkish protest planned to take place during the service. Mr Savaş was there at the service, rather than leading the protest. He told the South Wales Echo: "Whoever has done it should be ashamed of themselves. We would condemn any damage done to any religious monument."

It is unclear whether anyone will be caught, but it is even less clear why the attack took place at all. The finger can easily pointed at extreme Turkish nationalist groups - to put it politely, such circles can be irrational on occasion - but destroying a cross in some far-off country is utterly pointless. The perpetrators were hardly even recognised for it: Milliyet covered the story deep on an inside page; few other papers bothered. Coverage was scant in Britain too, save the BBC and South Wales Echo.

The blunt reality is that the right people simply don't care. If there needs to be change in Turkish-Armenian relations, it has to come from the top. But Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is busy lifting restrictions on headscarves in universities, and Armenia is in the midst of presidential elections. The Cardiff incident is just another episode of mudslinging.

As it did in November, the plain piece of Welsh stone symbolises the gulf between Turkey and Armenia. Sunday went to show once again that it will not be bridged any time soon.

Second photo from the BBC News article "Memorial to 'genocide' vandalised", published Monday 28 January 2008.

James in Turkey took a very long break from November, involving lots of research and reading, as well as the occasional fish supper by the Bosphorus. Normal service - if there ever was such a thing - resumes now.

Polar opposites

2007-11-04T19:32:00.000+02:00

Memorials don't tend to be particularly exciting. They are superficial things: grand, but instantial; attractive, but symbolic. They don't do anything. Their role is just to sit and be an aide-mémoire.

The trouble with symbolism is that it makes for an easy target, and target practice was exactly what fifty-or-so Turks were doing when they gathered outside the Temple of Peace in Cardiff. They were there to protest the unveiling of a memorial dedicated to the victims of what so many call an Armenian genocide.

It was meant to be a sombre, religious affair. The idea was for the Armenian ambassador and Welsh presiding officer to unveil the memorial (a "khatchkar"), to have Britain's leading Armenian bishop bless it, and to celebrate the burgeoning Welsh-Armenian relationship. Then everyone would be happy: the Welsh would celebrate a rare moment of internationalism, the Armenians would have something bearing the word "genocide" on British public land. All very symbolic.

The Turks did not ruin the event (the khatchkar was blessed, as was this blogger, a sole recipient of holy water on the nose) but they certainly made their voice heard. "What is the Armenian genocide? Pack of lies" was the dominant chant of the day, others called it a "monument of shame". One thoughtful banner read: "Armenian genocide: fact or fiction?" But there was no incursion into the temple, nor any attempt to reach or deface the memorial. The Welsh police contingent, about 10 officers strong, seemed almost unnecessary. Everyone was so well behaved.

But things did appear ugly, particularly when a Turkish camera operator was confronted shortly before the unveiling. "Would you please not speak in Turkish?" she was asked. "This is our place at the moment, okay?" The event organisers were then alerted and a brief squabble broke out. It ended only when a police officer came to escort not just the camera operator, but all the Turkish journalists away from the memorial. They co-operated, but were not happy. One Anatolia news agency reporter said she would complain to Britain's National Union of Journalists.

It was embarrassing for all, not least Stephen Thomas, the director of the Temple of Peace. It went against all the messages of peace and sincerity that had been given just moments before. There was a definite anti-Turkish feeling in the air: one visitor pointed to my t-shirt (which read "Polskie Morze byc najlepsze", purchased in Poland) and said that it was Turkish, and that I must be a Turk. There are only so many times you can say "gift from my mother" at the unveiling of a memorial before you draw the crowd's attention.

The eviction of Turkish journalists was despicable. It was also symbolic: it showed how clearly the lines are drawn, how far apart the sides have become. It is not the existence of a memorial that is controversial, it is that Wales has picked a side. And it is not the word "genocide" that is so sacred to Armenians and so taboo to Turks, it is the consequences of accepting that word.

This plain piece of Welsh stone symbolises the gulf between Turkey and Armenia. Yesterday went to show that it will not be bridged any time soon.

A time to be rational

2007-10-22T12:36:00.000+03:00

Yesterday saw the acceptance by the Turkish people of a package of reforms that brings about some important changes to Turkey's executive command, and more subtle - but no less substantial - changes to the workings of parliament. Unofficial results gave a solid "Yes" vote (69 percent), although turnout (67 percent) was the lowest recorded for a Turkish referendum.

The public consultation comes as Turkey is in the news for very different reasons, be it terrorism on the Iraqi border or Armenian bills in the US House of Representatives. The referendum has its roots in a government angry at not being able to elect its choice of president. Since then, there has been a general election, followed by a president one, and the number of dead in the southeast has been topped up by another few hundred. So the original motive for a public vote is gone, and there are other pressing things to worry about. Was the referendum worth it?

Of course it was. One of the reforms - electing the president by the people - is material to the way Turks are governed, and we now know Turks do want to choose their president in future. Turkish presidents from now on, including the incumbent Abdullah Gül, will serve no more than two five-year terms.

A less-trumpeted reform reduces the term of parliament to four years. This serves to formalise what has already been something of a tradition for Turkish parliaments for decades; it also reduces the possibility of a new president and parliament being chosen in the same year.

The other changes relate to quorum and voting procedures in parliament. The number of MPs needed for a session to be quorate is explicitly set out at 184 - a third of the total number of members plus one. This should prevent future brawls over the constitution like the one in the spring that annulled an attempt to elect Mr Gül and triggered an early general election.

Critics have dismissed the last change - and therefore the entire referendum - as a redundant, technical matter. They point to Mr Gül's election, the fresh AK mandate, and the work on a new constitution. One critic on NTV last night described it as "madness" that any party would willingly want to reduce its own parliamentary term. But let it not be forgetten that it was a mere "technical" argument over 184 or 367 votes that gridlocked Turkish politics for a fortnight. It was all worth it if only to prevent that from happening again.

The decision to push ahead with the referendum is also a show of principled politics on the part of the AK party: it shows consistency and a belief that a public vote is a way to put issues to the people, not just an avenue to push their man to the top.

The critics do have one very important point. It had not been entirely clear whether Mr Gül would have to immediately step down and contest a direct president election if there was a yes vote. Parliament voted just last week to clear up that anomaly, but voters based outside of Turkey had already been voting on the original text at border checkpoints since September. You can't change the rules after the game has started, however small the change might be.

The Turkish press has been remarkably uninterested in the news this morning, and that is unsurprising. The referendum coincided with the deaths of twelve Turkish soldiers in a PKK attack on the village of Dağlıca, close to the Iraqi border. Up to thirty terrorists were killed in the hot pursuit that followed, but army sources estimate there were up to 150 PKK members involved and most of them had disappeared back over the border. No country can tolerate attacks of this size and frequency for long.

The big question is whether the AK government will use its fresh parliamentary approval to launch a cross-border raid into Iraq and seek out the PKK camps. The answer is that Turkey has about as much right to enter Iraq as coalition forces did in 2003. The reality is that a raid would probably have little effect, just like the twenty-four attempts that preceeded it. But this is a country that is getting impatient and insecure. Acumen doesn't come into it.

This resolution is not the answer

2007-10-11T00:52:00.000+03:00

And so it passes. A few hours ago, the Foreign Affairs Committee in the US House of Representatives voted 27 to 21 in favour of a bill that finds the Armenian massacres of 1915 to be genocide. It passed a lot narrower than many expected - the very public objections of State Secretary Condoleeza Rice and several of her predecessors will have helped with that - but pass it still did. From here, the bill moves to a full vote in the House.

The Turks are angry. President Abdullah Gül has responded already, accusing the voting members of "sacrificing large-scale issues for small domestic political games". At the vote, a Turkish parliamentary delegation expressed its sorrow; the Armenian delegation burst into applause. There have been small-scale protests outside the US Embassy in Ankara, and there are expected to be more tomorrow. Oh, and armed police guards have already appeared at Istanbul's Armenian churches.

It is a victory for America's pro-Armenian lobby. The slim Democratic majority means that it is likely, though by no means certain, that both houses of Congress will vote the bill through. President Bush has made his opposition clear, which scuppers the chance of any formal policy change for the moment. And in any case, the bill is non-binding. The United States will continue to not use the word "genocide" when referring to the events of 1915.

So why such vociferous Turkish anger? Part of it is down to the bill itself (avaliable here). Historically speaking, it is a crude effort. The first article of section two, in particular, is highly contested: "The Armenian Genocide ... (resulted) in the deportation of nearly 2,000,000 Armenians, of whom 1,500,000 men, women, and children were killed, 500,000 survivors were expelled from their homes, and which succeeded in the elimination of the over 2,500-year presence of Armenians in their historic homeland." Even those Western historians who refer to an Armenian genocide will tell you they can't speak in specific numbers. No-one knows how many people perished; politicising history won't help us find out.

But there are two other reasons for Turkey's anger, rooted far beyond the content of the American bill. First, many Turks genuinely believe they could not have carried out such an atrocious act. "I cannot believe we were able to organise ourselves into doing it," a friend once told me. "We can hardly organise the day-to-day workings of government." Second, there is the very real issue of financial compensation to the descendants of those Armenians who were deported.

This evening, the tabloid Hürriyet's website carried an American and Turkish flag under the headline "Is this the end of a hundred-year partnership?" Of course it isn't, and Turkey isn't about to kick the United States out of İncirlik Air Base (usefully close to the Iraqi border) either. The US leadership knows precisely how sensitive the Armenian issue is, and it also knows how valuable Turkey is as an ally.

But that does not mean Turkey should just stand around grumbling to anyone who will listen. There are two things it can - and should - do. Firstly, it should unilaterally open diplomatic relations with Armenia, irrespective of that country's continued occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh. Secondly, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan should fulfil his earlier promise and appoint a delegation of Turkish, Armenian and Western historians to investigate what exactly happened in eastern Anatolia between 1915 and 1923. As Mr Erdoğan has said before, it is a question for historians, not politicians.

The Chairman of the House committee, Tom Lantos, described today's bill as a "sobering choice" between the desire to condemn "this historic nightmare" as genocide against a possible greater risk to US troops. It will do neither; nor, it seems, will it have the happy side-effect of reigniting historical debate on the matter. It is the Turkish side that needs to take the initiative with that.

The end of the CHP

2007-09-10T12:46:00.000+03:00

We all know the Republican People's Party (CHP) has been somewhat split since the July's general election. We also know that Mustafa Sarıgül, mayor of Istanbul's Şişli district, has launched a campaign to topple the party's stubborn leader, Deniz Baykal, and has recruited a sizeable group to his cause. What we didn't know was the extent of the split in the CHP. Two separate meetings in Ankara yesterday helped us figure that one out.

September 9th is the anniversary of the CHP's foundation. Mr Baykal chose to mark this day, and no doubt reassert his dwindling influence, by visiting the tomb of his party's founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. And so 170 thousand people from all across the country descended on the mausoleum in Ankara. They arrived with Turkish flags and posters of their founder, and chanted for enduring secularism. Mr Baykal wrote in the VIP guestbook that there were "attacks on the Republic from inside, not outside" and it had to be defended. All in all, it was rather like those Republican rallies that took place in the spring.

It just so happened that Mr Baykal's attempts to secure his seat coincided with another rally barely ten minutes down the road, in front of the CHP headquarters. This was the Sarıgül rally, with its desperately uncatchy slogan "Codeword: 999 S, destination: government". It turns out "999 S" refers to a Sarıgül rally on the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month. Ho-hum. It was not the success Sarıgülists would tell you it was: attendance was ten thousand, a mere fifth of what was predicted; Mr Sarıgül was himself the only major figure present; and television news that evening gave more space to Mr Baykal's gig.

There are two conclusions that can be drawn from the day's events. The first is that Mr Baykal's leadership is in the ironic position of being both untenable and secure. He won yesterday: his was the bigger rally, his was the greater parade of influence. Mr Sarıgül does not command nearly as much support, even among Baykal antagonists, and that is partly because he is seen as insincere and unlikeable. In that sense, he differs little from Mr Baykal. For the moment, there is little hope of a change in CHP leadership.

The second conclusion is far more serious: the end is nigh for Atatürk's unreformed party. In his cumulative sixteen-or-so years as CHP leader, Deniz Baykal has entrenched Kemalist ideology, stamped out the high fliers and secured his position by fractioning the Turkish left. As Mr Sarıgül rightly pointed out yesterday, July's election was the seventh in a row that the CHP had lost - and that's without counting local elections. Mr Baykal has now presided over four of them.

Mr Baykal answers critics by saying they won a million more votes than last time; what he blindly ignores is that the governing AK party won six million additional votes. He ignores polls that say nearly three-quarters of CHP voters voted "in spite of the leader". He refuses to recognise that AK's phenomenal victory came through embracing every section of the Turkish people; Mr Baykal did not campaign east of Sivas.

But the issue here is more than mere electoral mathematics. It is now a question of what the CHP is for. There are two stark choices: should it continue to be Atatürk's party and defend his mantra to the death, or should it reclaim those social democratic roots and form a balance to the centre-right AK party? Turkey has changed, the two are no longer compatible. Mr Baykal does not recognise that. The phrase "out of touch" has never been more fitting.

It is with great sorrow that I predict the end of the CHP. This is not fatal for Turkish political opposition, as I had warned a couple of months ago, because Devlet Bahçeli's Nationalist Action Party has since cunningly slipped itself into that position. But it is fatal for the Turkish left wing, which has never been so fractioned and ineffective. Turkey is a naturally conservative country, but that doesn't mean it can do without a liberal voice. The trouble is that there is no easy solution.

The judge who never smiles

2007-08-27T20:51:00.000+03:00

Day two thousand, six hundred and fifty-nine must have been Ahmet Necdet Sezer's happiest as President of Turkey. Seeing as the last of his packing was done months ago, he didn't have very much to do except visit the new parliament speaker, Köksal Toptan, on the final leg of his farewell tour. He turned up in the early afternoon, met Mr Toptan at the door and went inside for a twenty minute chat. Predictably, the outgoing president was given a gift: a porcelain plate, hand-made as one of Turkey's finest, was handed over in front of an army of photographers. Rather less predictably, Mr Sezer grinned. He did. Honest. It was a wide grin too. It seems one of the country's grumpiest men can have a spark of fun, too.

At 65, Mr Sezer is the youngest president to leave the post since İsmet İnönü. He was also the first non-partisan, non-military president, having been Turkey's chief justice before becoming the "consensus candidate" to succeed Süleyman Demirel. It was unprecedented stuff: he was jointly nominated not just by the Prime Minister, Bülent Ecevit, and the leaders of the three-party coalition, but also the leaders of both main opposition parties.

But Mr Sezer was not first choice - Ecevit had wanted to extend Mr Demirel's term by three years - and there were eight other candidates for the job, which meant the consensus man was only elected in the third round. But he took the job with nerve. "I shall do all I can," he said after his election, "to protect national unity, defend secularism and achieve the distribution of wealth." It was that third aim that was to get him into trouble.

On February 19th, 2001, Mr Sezer used a meeting of the National Security Council to hold Ecevit to account on wealth distribution. The prime minister's coalition was looking shaky, and an IMF recovery plan to rid Turkey of chronic inflation and economic instability was not going well. Mr Sezer accused Ecevit of not pulling his weight to tackle corruption and, in an infamous heated moment, threw a copy of the constitution towards the prime minister, one presumes for his inspection. Ecevit stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

Analysts later said it was not what Mr Sezer said that had infuriated Ecevit, it was the way he said it. Either way, it caused an economic crisis that shrunk the Turkish economy by a mammoth 10 percent. The Central Bank sold 5 billon dollars on the day of the argument alone in an attempt to buoy a plunging market. It didn't work; thousands lost their jobs, hundreds of thousands saw their savings erased. Ecevit's career never recovered. He and his coalition partners were all voted out of parliament the following year in elections that swept Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's religious AK party to power. President Sezer was all that was left of the old guard.

In the years that followed, Mr Sezer vetoed laws, ammendments and appointments by the AK government - more than any of his predecessors. Far from the man who helped bring crisis, among secuarlists he became the stalwart traditionalist force against a new wave of political Islam. For AK supporters, he was a stubborn, inflexible bureaucrat. He became particularly popular among supporters of the Republican People's Party (CHP), with many canvassing him to replace Deniz Baykal. He has always dismissed those calls, but he has made no secret of his dislike of Mr Erdoğan's politics, and admitted to being surprised and dissatifised with last month's election result.

Ahmet Necdet Sezer was a boring, unwavering, unidealistic president. You could say he treated the post like a judge - he used the state's founding principles as his guide, and didn't stray far from them. Some might call that blind progress, ignoring developments around you, but few could argue Mr Sezer didn't play by the book.

His was the slimline presidency - he was never one for pomp and ceremony, he always returned a part of his presidential budget unspent at the end of the year, and even during the AK years he was rarely outspoken in day-to-day politics. He would insist his convoy stopped at red traffic lights. He would leave the confines of the presidential palace to go shopping. Even his darkest hour, the 2001 crisis, was triggered by his urge to make life better for the ordinary Turk. He gave the impression of a good, modest man, a man who assumed the presidency not because of the glamour but because he genuinely thought it a service to his country.

This presidency has had a timely ending. Turkey is richer, more stable and more mature than it was when Mr Sezer was sworn in seven years and three weeks ago. It now needs the energy of a stimulating president to tackle the country's most ingrained issues.

They say good men do not necessarily make good presidents; Ahmet Necdet Sezer was a boring president, but he was still a good one. His stolidness was just the palpable kind of honesty a country of sleaze and corruption needed. And his beaming smiles today show that even the most adamant judge can hang his robes and go home. His work is done.

Wonderful censorship

2007-08-23T23:33:00.001+03:00

After a month of grey London, it was sheer joy to land in Istanbul and step out into sunshine brighter than the orange easyJet plane that brought me to it. What wonderful weather, I thought to myself.

I sailed through customs at the delightfully small Sabiha Gökçen Airport and promptly arranged for the Havaş driver to take his bus via Levent, which is closer to home, rather than direct to Taksim, which is slap bang in the centre of town. This he did just for me. What wonderful people, I thought.

Then I jumped on a minibus to realise I didn't have change for the fare, and made to get off to find a cash machine. But another passenger jumped up and paid the driver for me. What a wonderful country this is.

So when I settled down in front of my computer that evening for my semi-regular tromp around a few favourite websites, I was feeling rather happy about things. And happy I stayed, right up until I typed in the address for Jake's Foreign Perspectives blog and was confronted with a rather rude message, complete with dodgy translaton:

"Bu siteye erişim mahkeme kararıyla engellenmiştir.

T.C. Fatih 2.Asliye Hukuk Mahkemesi 2007/195 Nolu Kararı gereği bu siteye erişim engellenmiştir.

Access to this site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/195 of T.C. Fatih 2.Civil Court of First Instance."

Turkey has banned WordPress, the blogging platform. This is not a move without precedent; the popular definitions site ekşisözlük and, more famously, YouTube have both been blocked in the past. Turk Telekom's virtual monopoly on internet access in Turkey makes a ban an easy thing to enforce. There is, after all, just the one service provider to submit a court order to. Such a ban wouldn't be as easy in a place like Britain, where multiple companies maintain the country's internet infrastructure.

The man behind this ban is the Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar, more popularly known by his pen name Harun Yahya. It seems Mr Oktar took offence at some sentiments expressed about his person on a certain WordPress blog, and proceeded to have his lawyers ban the entire platform. Mr Oktar's lawyers were also behind the ekşisözlük ban, which was only lifted after the entries about him were deleted.

Censorship in Turkey has long been extensive. When it comes to certain sensitive subjects - be it the Kurds, the Armenians, the hidden state or the military - Turkish journalists have always exercised a degree of self-censorship. Even ordinary Turks have a habit of lowering their voices when talking politics, lest they be overheard. In such an environment, the mere recalling of books and banning of websites can be almost second nature.

But despite its long history of censorship, the Turkish state has yet to realise that it just doesn't work. When YouTube was banned for an anti-Atatürk video that appeared in its wares, every other Turkish internet user found a way of watching the video to see out what the fuss was about. I myself have met authors who are delighted when their books are banned and taken away by the police. It makes people want to read them. Surely it's like dealing with a spoilt child - giving attention only makes it worse.

I have very little time for Mr Oktar. He is not an intelligent man. The legal action he has taken against certain WordPress blogs are completely in character and, as far as I can see, without much justification. I don't see how a tiny blog can do much personal harm to him.

But my personal thoughts aside, there is a bigger issue here - the fact that it is possible to ban parts of the Internet in Turkey. The courts should not be able to close entire websites in responsible to a single libel claim. More important than that, though, the internet access of an entire country should not rest in the hands of one single company, however privatised it might be. It's time to break up Turk Telekom.

Now we know - again

2007-08-13T21:40:00.001+03:00

Abdullah Gül has just been announced as the AK party's candidate for president again. As anyone who has read anything about Turkey over the last few months will know, he was nominated by his party for the post in April and had to pull out after the most controversial presidential election in Turkish history.

Unlike last time, this nomination comes from the AK party's executive committee, and not the prime minister himself. One of Mr Erdoğan's greatest mistakes last time was to stubbornly keep his choice of candidate secret until the last minute. He announced it a few hours before nominations closed, not even giving his party a chance to digest the news. This time, the party sat down and talked about whether it worth putting Mr Gül forward again. That is a good thing.

Also unlike last time, it seems Mr Gül might have some opposition support. Cihan Paçacı, Secretary-General of the National Action Party (MHP), has said in the last few minutes that he does not "expect a crisis over the nomination". This is not to say the MHP will be voting for Mr Gül, but they have decided to turn up and push attendance over that crucial 367 figure. That would be enough to elect him.

Mr Gül is off canvassing tomorrow, beginning in the morning with MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli. He is also likely to visit the main opposition CHP and the Democratic Left Party, although both have already said they do not support him. CHP leader Deniz Baykal has described the MHP's decision to attend the vote as "surprising"; Mr Bahçeli countered by saying: "What would our next move be if we did not attend and made it impossible to have an election? We cannot support using crisis and uncertainty to deal in politics." He is absolutely right.

The process is like last time: the first two rounds are on August 20th and 24th, where a candidate needs 367 votes to win. The next two rounds are on August 28th and September 1st, when a candidate requires just a simple majority. Under the precendent set by April's abortive election, there also needs to be at least 367 MPs casting votes for the round to be valid.

AK has a large enough majority to elect Mr Gül on August 28th, provided the MHP comes to watch. But with 340 seats (minus the speaker), they are 25 votes short of electing him in an earlier round. That gap could be easily bridged with MHP support. Another less likely option would be to cobble together the twenty seats of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party with independents and rebels from other parties. Most likely is that Mr Gül will become president in the third round.

The media in Turkey and abroad will probably interpret the renomination as AK defiance in the face of the CHP and the army. That isn't the way I look at it. But the question that far fewer people seem to be asking is whether Abdullah Gül would make a good president. He is a capable man, aware of the country's institutions, and is certainly no-one's puppet. He is the Foreign Ministry's loss.

The answer is yes.

So, what's next?

2007-07-31T14:24:00.000+03:00

Yesterday, Turkey's Electoral Commission officially confirmed the results of last Sunday's election. There are two significant alterations: AK have gained an extra seat at the expense of an independent in the far southeastern town of Hakkari. The race there was already very close, and it seems that the expatriate vote tipped the balance in the government's favour.

Also, the MHP have lost a seat after one their elected MPs was killed in a road accident while on his way to collect his seals of office. The Commission decided his seat should remain empty, rather than going to the next candidate on the MHP list.

That concludes Turkey's 16th general election. AK now have 341 seats, while the CHP has 112 and the MHP 70. Coverage of the result has been wide and varied; it takes no more than a couple of clicks to read analyses of how it has been a statement against the army, or against the secular establishment, or the end of Turkey as we know it. One particularly amusing column in the New York Post seems to think the Turkish people have willingly ushered in the Middle Ages. Fair enough - but does anyone know if I can still get a mortgage on my straw hut?

I think we've all have enough of analysis and nayesaying. It's now time to look forward. With the results confirmed, parliament will be sworn in on Saturday. Work will begin at once, and there's plenty to be done. So for those who are interested, and indeed those who are not, here's my unofficial, unadulterated take on what to expect over the next few weeks:

1. A new president
This is what triggered elections in the first place, and once parliament is sworn in and a new speaker eleted, this will be the first item on the agenda. Abdullah Gül, the AK party's candidate, has indicated he will stand again, and Deniz Baykal's CHP has reiterated they will not support him. But a repeat of April's 367 scenario seems unlikely, now that the MHP has indicated it will attend the vote.

There is, however, hope of compromise. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said he will be visiting each leader individually - including Mr Baykal - to discuss candidates. The most likely outcomes seems to be Mr Gül's election as president.

2. A new consitution
A new constitution for Turkey, crafted by civilian leaders rather than military chiefs, appeared in both AK's and the MHP's manifestos, and it seems work is underway already. It's looking interesting: a lot of AK's proposals seem to involve reducing the influence of state bodies among each other. They want to largely cut the president's powers of appointment and allow his other decrees to be answerable in court.

There are proposals to further reduce the military's influence over state affairs: the National Security Council of military chiefs, for instance, would cease to be a constitutional body, and the Supreme Military Court would be regulated by the civilian courts, not the army. There are also plans to abolish mandatory religion lessons in schools.

These are all, of course, unanounced AK proposals, and will be discussed in parliament and the media before being put to any kind of vote, but it is very much work in progress.

3. Iraq
There are very real fears, now that the election is over, that Turkish troops will be sent into northern Iraq to clear out suspected PKK positions. There have been mutterings over the last few days of a joint US-Iraqi mission in the region, but that hasn't stopped fatal bomb attacks in the southeast. Patience is wearing ever more thin.

4. An EU publicity campaign
Portugal, currently holding the European Union rotating presidency, has made it one of its principal targets to put talks with Turkey back on track. It will culminate, as it has over the last couple of years, in a summit at the end of December that will assess Turkey's progress and decide whether to plod on.

Mr Erdoğan has already said that EU-oriented reforms will continue; now, with a stable majority and several years until the next election, he has the security to sell the EU to increasingly sceptical Turkish public. But the scepticism is not restricted to these shores: the anti-Turkey lobby in the EU has found new voice in French president Nicholas Sarkozy. He has indicated he wants to use this December's summit to divert the EU's relationship with Turkey to something short of membership.

5. A tumultuous opposition
Despite his refusal to resign, Deniz Baykal's position as leader of the CHP is looking shaky. Routine leadership elections are due at a party conference in the Autumn, and the arid Mustafa Sarıgül, mayor of a district in Istanbul, has said he will stand against him. There is also a growing resistance movement led by former parliament speaker Hikmet Çetin.

But it is not just about failing leaders. The Turkish political landscape remains dangerously segregated, with entrenched splits on the left, right and centre. There will need to be some drastic restructuring if the AK party is to be challenged.

These are just a few of the items on a busy summer agenda for Turkey. The country is open for business again. That can only be good news.

A resounding victory that now needs moderation

2007-07-23T14:43:00.000+03:00

Last night, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan managed to do what very few of his predecessors could and secured a second, larger mandate from the Turkish people. The AK party won 46.6 percent* of the vote, up from 34 percent five years ago. The main opposition CHP made gains too, moving up a point to 20.85 percent. But it was still a terrible result for Deniz Baykal's party because the bulk of the anti-AKP vote went instead to the nationalist MHP, which staged a successful recovery from its 2002 showing. It got 14.29 percent.

What was most surprising about this election was not the size of AK's victory or the crumbling CHP opposition, but the speed with which the results arrived. NTV began spurting results at 6.50pm, far earlier than the previous election. Within the hour, Mehmet Ağar had resigned as leader of the Democrat Party, citing a poor showing.

And it was indeed a poor showing for the Democrats: 5.41 was far short of the 10 percent threshold for a party that was just a few votes short of crossing it five years ago. Doing worse was Cem Uzan's Youth Party (GP), which despite its aggressive campaign failed to register anywhere. The Felicity Party (SP), the other half of the split in Islamic politics that created the AK party, won a meagre two percent. For them, this vote reinforced what most people believed: that the Turkish people aren't looking for an Islamic state.

This election saw the largest number of independent candidates to enter parliament. Among them was Mesut Yılmaz, the former prime minister who has thrown off charges of corruption stretching back to his time in power to make his return to politics. Rumour has it that he might be pushing for the vacant Democratic leadership. The leader of the right-wing Great Union Party (BBP), Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu, was also elected.

Most significant among the independents are those candidates backed by the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP). 23 of them were elected, enough to establish a parliamentary group and make them the fourth-largest party in parliament.

So how will the new parliament look? Well, official results pending, we know that the AK should have 340 seats and the MHP 71. When the DTP reforms, they will wield 23 seats and when, as is expected, Mr Yazıcıoğlu rejoins his party, the BBP will have a seat too. A seat should also go to a third independent from the Freedom and Solidarity Party (ÖDP).

But what of the CHP? They are projected to have 112 seats, down from 178 they won five years ago, but that is before we take into account the alliance with the Democratic Left Party (DSP). Under the agreement, 13 DSP candidates were to run on the CHP ticket and break away after entering parliament. If they follow through, the CHP will have fewer than a hundred MPs.

Here's how things look:

AKP: 340   DSP: 13
CHP: 99   BBP: 1
MHP: 71   ÖDP: 1
DTP: 23   Ind: 2

For Mr Erdoğan, it is nothing short of a spectacular victory. This morning's papers have called it "the people's memorandum", a reference to the army's warning a few months ago. Foreign news sources say it shows the Turkish people don't agree with warnings that the secular establishment is under threat.

For the CHP, things are grim. The DSP factor makes things look even worse. Mr Baykal has not shown his face since casting his vote in Antalya yesterday morning, and there were angry protests when an official appeared outside party headquarters last night to make a statement to the press. There are calls for Mr Baykal's resignation, even from the traditionally supportive Cumhuriyet newspaper. He might well go but, as one my wiser elders pointed out to me on the phone last night, there's every chance he might come back. He certainly has a habit of doing so.

AK's victory has exposed the weakness of Turkey's opposition: they are simply not organised enough. Hope of unity on the right wing failed after a last minute brawl, and Mr Ağar's Democrats paid for it bitterly with a vote share lower than any of its predecessor parties. The left wing CHP-DSP alliance, meanwhile, is nothing more than a blatant attempt to bypass the electoral threshold. Even the nationalist vote is split, although Devlet Bahçeli's MHP has shown remarkable success in winning back votes from the GP.

In his victory speech last night, Mr Erdoğan made all the right noises: he said the European Union was still their guide for reform, he said they would not shirk from the Republic's basic principles, and he even led his delighted audience in a chant of "one nation, one country, one flag, one state". That should placate the secularist elite for now.

The prime minister might have shown he is not being complacent, but that does not mean he is never going to be. The AK victory should not go unchecked; a credible opposition is a vital part of any democracy. This is why the CHP must drastically reform both itself and Turkish social democracy. I suggest they start with their leader.

* according to results that won't be officially confirmed until next week.
Photo from NTVMSNBC.

Vote 2007: The fall of the Turkish left

2007-07-22T20:54:00.000+03:00

As things stand, tongiht is looking like a better result for Turkey than 2002. The AK's mandate is greater, but their power has been curbed. A third party is guaranteed to enter parliament (MHP) and a fourth is set to appear (DTP), which means more Turks have their votes represented. And the CHP might just be forced into badly-needed reorganistion.

An analyst on NTV has just declared Turkey to be "the only major European country not to have a significant political force on the left wing". Now at 9pm, with just about four-fifths of the votes counted, it looks like an accurrate assessment.

The CHP is set to win around 20 percent of the vote, give or take a couple of percent. As is stands, it is a slight improvement on their position of 2002, when they received 19 percent. But the AK's increased majority and the MHP's entry into parliament means that the CHP are to lose a drastic number of seats - the latest NTV projection gives them 110 seats, a loss of 68. And let us not forget that the CHP's seat tally includes that of the Democratic Left Party, which has said it would break away to form its own group after the elections. In short, it is difficult not to call the CHP the big losers in this election.

My ideal presidential candidate, Hikmet Çetin, is also on NTV. He has interpreted the result as "a lack of achievement for the opposition, rather than an accomplishment for the AKP".

The MHP have been remarkably successful. It is no small feat to double your vote of five years ago, when Devlet Bahçeli's party won just 8.34 percent. It seems unlikely that they will reach their historical high of nearly 18 percent, set in 1999, but they are forecast to win around seventy seats.

Another point to note are those independent MP candidates supported by the DTP. Private television stations here are projecting 23 DTP independents will be entering parliament, which would be enough for them to form a parliamentary group. The electoral system does make it rather difficult, however, to predict the share of the vote for specific independent candidates, so these might be the last results we receive.

In all of this, however, what has not been mentioned is the AK party, and the sheer size of their victory. AK's share of the vote has increased by as much as 13 percent, which is nearly a third. They have already become the only governing party in half a century to increase its share of the vote. The MHP's arrival means that AK are in the awkward position of losing seats despite its increased majority, but this should be no more than twenty seats.

I don't think the magnitude of their can be exaggerated easily. Out of Turkey's 81 provinces, AK is leading in 68 of them, and is second in twelve of them. Only in the eastern province of Tunceli, where independents are leading and the CHP is second, has the AK been pushed into third place. This demonstrates how much of a national party AK have become. As Mr Çetin pointed out on NTV, "only (AK leader) Erdoğan and (Democrat party leader) Ağar campaigned east of Sivas." The CHP and MHP were conspicuously absent in the east.

Deniz Baykal must be a worried man.

Vote 2007: March of the independents

2007-07-22T20:15:00.000+03:00

This election has seen nearly 700 independent candidates across the country. Never before in a Turkish election have there been so many. With the AK party's victory just about certain, it might be interesting to note that at least six independents have entered parliament already.

Among them is the former prime minister Mesut Yılmaz, who was running as a candidate from the Black Sea town of Rize. He is a former member of the centre-right Motherland Party - given his MP status, he could be a candidate for leadership of the Democrat Party, which has literally been vacated in the last hour.

Ahmet Türk and Aysel Tuğluk, co-leaders of the Kurdish DTP, have also entered parliament. The size of their DTP contingent remains to be seen. An interesting pro-Kurdish name is Sebahat Tuncel, who is running in Istanbul but is currently serving a prison sentence - she has also guaranteed a seat.

Elsewhere, the AK party are doing extremely well in the Aegean, a part of Turkey that is traditionally secularist and, by consequence, pro-CHP. The CHP have pulled ahead in Izmir, but are suffering considerable losses elsewhere, and it seems that the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) is shaping out to be the alternative party of choice to the AK party.

NTV's prediction at 8.20pm forecasts AK will have 342 seats (down 21), CHP: 111 (down 67), MHP: 73 (up 73) and 24 independent seats.

Things to watch out for:

1 - The second placed party. The AK victory is almost certain, but the CHP's position as the main opposition party is looking very shaky. Officials at CHP headquarters are said to be "stunned".

2 - The size of the AK party majority. It looks likely that AK will be able to govern alone, but with three parties now guaranteed to enter parliament, both the AKP and the CHP will return with fewer seats than they won in 2002.

3 - The southeast. The number of those independent MPs who have vowed to join the DTP upon election cannot be predicted yet. They are aiming for at least twenty, so they can form a parliamentary group, which would give them added weight.

Vote 2007: Democrat resignation

2007-07-22T19:45:00.000+03:00

Mehmet Ağar, leader of the Democrat Party, has just resigned. It seems certain his party won't cross the election threshold.

I have to admit I wasn't expecting the resignation so soon. Hüsamettin Cindoruk, who used to be parliament speaker during the administration of a Democrat Party predecessor, wasn't expecting it quite so quickly either: "He could have at least waited until midnight".

It's not even eight o'clock yet. This may not be the only resignation we see tonight.

Vote 2007: Three parties in parliament

2007-07-22T19:26:00.000+03:00

CNN Turk are predicting a win for the AK party with 46.88 percent of the vote, with a 1.5 percent error margin. Here is the result put together by the reputable Konda poll company:

AKP 46.88
CHP 18.12
MHP 15.74
Independents 6.03
DP 5.28
GP 3.11

NTV says the turnout was 81 percent, up from 74.3 percent in 2002. And this in spite of temperatures above 35 degrees in most parts of the country.

NTV also says that with 47.9 percent of the ballots counted, AK have a national share of 48.8 percent. Second is the CHP on 18.1, third is the MHP on 14.6, which would mean the AK, CHP and MHP have all crossed the election threshold. This will be a parliament of at least three parties.

Meanwhile, Turkish state television is being surprisingly frugal in its results service. TRT reports only 10 percent of votes counted, while the private stations say almost half are counted. Does someone smell an anomaly?

Vote 2007: An AK sweep - already

2007-07-22T19:17:00.000+03:00

Striken by food poisoning, I'm seated in front of my television watching the results of Turkey's 16th general election roll in. It makes exciting watching.

As of 7.15pm local time, around a third of all votes have been counted. Here are the major developments:

1 - The incumbent AK party has a 50.4 percent share of all votes counted so far. This means the government has crossed the 10% election threshold already.

2 - The main opposition CHP is leading in Turkey's third largest city, Izmir, and in Izmir only. AK is very close behind.

3 - In a number of provinces in the southeast, including Diyarbakır, independent candidates are leading. The AK party is second. The provinces in the southeast are significant because most of the independent candidates are supported by the predominantly Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP), in an attempt to bypass the threshold.

However, the sweep of independent candidates across the southeast is not universal. In some provinces, such as Mardin and Şırnak, the AK party has taken the lead.

4 - As it stands, most of these results are from Turkey's eastern provinces, where polls closed an hour earlier. Barely a tenth of votes have been counted in Turkey's three biggest cities of Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.

NTV's exit poll predicts a 45 percent victory for the AK party, with the CHP on 20 percent and the nationalist MHP on 14 percent. With three parties crossing the threshold, this would reduce the number of seats presently held by the AK and the CHP, but AK would still be able to govern alone.

More comments soon.

Closure

2007-07-09T10:55:00.001+03:00

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told this morning's Akşam that he wanted Turkey's next president to be elected by parliament from a list of compromise candidates. He said he would visit other political party leaders with the list if necessary, and added: "They (critics) told me I should have previously come forward with multiple candidates, not just the one. We can do that. We will seek compromise over a list of candidates that the constitution finds appropriate."

His words come after similar - but separate - words from main opposition leader Deniz Baykal. Mr Erdoğan was quick to say that while the 11th president, successor to the current incumbent, would be elected by parliament, the 12th president will "definitely" be elected by the people. Mr Baykal has made no such commitment.

The prime minister also said the president's powers would be restricted: "The president's powers will be narrowed, like in Austria and Finland. Prime Ministers are the ones who answer to the people, but it is they who are obstructed on every path. A strengthened prime ministry system is on the way."

As an electoral pledge, we will have to make do with this for now. Turkey is in need of major institutional change, and the leader of the party most likely to win the election has promised to deliver it. It is time, finally, to put the presidential election to one side. It is time to concentrate instead on who should lead Turkey into the next decade.

Onwards to referendum

2007-07-05T21:23:00.000+03:00

The Constitutional Court ruled this evening that the Turkish people should be allowed to decide whether they want to elect their own president. It comes after President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and the main opposition CHP formally complained about the way the proposal was voted through parliament. The Court's decision is final: the Turkish people will be going to vote in a referendum in October at the very latest.

The ruling was always going to be a controversial one - this very blog saw a very heated discussion on the legalities surrounding the dispute - and the voting margin was as narrow it gets: six of the eleven high judges voted in favour of scrapping the complaint. Five were against.

My regular readers will know this was not the decision I was expecting, having lost considerable faith in the judiciary. But this was the right decision, and there is no need to wave a copy of the constitution about to understand why. An unelected body should not stop the Turkish people from choosing what they want to do. There is no democratic argument for it.

What happens next really depends on who wins the general election. If the AK party is returned to power, prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government might try again to pass a law that reduces the waiting time for a referendum to 45 days. That law has been vetoed by Mr Sezer once before; it would be near-comical if he decided to put a law about referendums to a referendum.

If the AK party does not win the election, some experts say the new government might try to elect Mr Sezer's successor in parliament, using the existing system. But AK will probably still have enough seats to boycott and derail the process, just like the CHP did in April. Every lawyer has a different opinion.

All this, of course, is little more than speculation. It is not clear what the parliament will look like after July 22nd. What is clear is that Turkey's constitution, drafted by the army in 1982, is drastically insufficient in coping with democratic crises. We need a new one.

We might just get it. AK's election manifesto pledges a "civilian constitution" prepared with consultation and compromise. Mehmet Ağar's Democrat Party and even the far-right Nationalist Action Party have made similar promises. But the CHP and the nationalist Youth Party have both kept quiet.

What needs to happen over the remainder of this summer is for Turkey's new parliament to elect a new president under the existing system, so that Mr Sezer's term can finally end and stability can finally return to the pyramid's peak. The new government should then set to work on a new constitution that overhauls the entire system. The president would then act as a transitional figure until 2012, when the next head of state would be elected by the people. Turkey's transition to a country truly operating under the rule of law would then be complete.

And once again, unrelenting as I am, I nominate Hikmet Çetin to oversee that transition.

Hiatus

2007-07-05T10:24:00.000+03:00

James on Turkey has been taking a break for the last couple of weeks, owing to other commitments. I should return shortly with a full look at the coming elections, hopefully beginning with today's expected ruling from the Constitutional Court. Watch this space.

Stop press: Annulments at the door

2007-06-15T19:19:00.000+03:00

Further to my entry below, the rapporteur for the Constitutional Court has told reporters that he believes the bill should be scrapped because the vote on some of the articles did not achieve quorum. He said: "367 votes are needed for each article. The reform package should be cancelled completely." I'm still waiting for someone to show me the legal basis for that. So much for an apolitical judiciary.

The rapporteur's opinion is only advisory. It will be a group of high judges that make the decision, but few expect a contrary decision to emerge. There will be no referendum, and the president will not be elected by the Turkish people this time. A very great shame.

Don't hurry, it will happen soon enough

2007-06-15T14:15:00.000+03:00

In the last hour, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer announced he was calling a referendum on a bill that would allow his successors to be elected directly by the people. A short statement from the President's Office said that the public vote would be for the entire bill, which was a package of seven rather fundamental changes to the Turkish constitution.

It reduces a president's term from seven years to five, but allows for two terms. Candidates would need the support of twenty MPs to secure a nomination. The election itself would be a nod to the French system, in which the candidate securing an absolute majority would win. If no-one gets enough votes, there would be a second round two weeks later in which only the top two candidates would run.

The bill also explicitly establishes the figure for a quorate meeting in parliament: 184. This article was included to avoid a repeat of April's election fiasco, in which the presidential vote was annulled because there was no clear figure in the constitution.

One final article reduces a full term of government from five years to four, which would set the next general election for 2011.

Mr Sezer was not allowed veto the package this time - that privilege is only granted to him once - so it was a choice between approving it and calling a public vote. He will also be taking the bill to the Constitutional Court, although the specifics of his complaint are anyone's guess for now.

All in all, this is good news. It does scupper the government's plans of running simultaneous parliamentary and presidental elections on July 22nd, but as a Turkish proverb goes, "the devil interferes in hurried work". Under the current rules, the referendum itelf can't be held before October. A separate bill that would bring it forward to August is still in Mr Sezer's inbox. And this one he can veto.

Mr Sezer has previously said he is against directly electing a president because the office in its current state wields too much power. There needs to be a discussion on how to alter the office, he says, before it can be publically electable. He has a point: Turkish presidents do have a first-time veto over any law that comes out of parliament and the final say on the appointment of all top state officials. Of course, Mr Sezer himself doesn't shy from using that power. He has vetoed more laws than any of his predecessors.

So you might be wondering where the good news is. The Constitutional Court, after all, can still throw out the bill and halt the referendum process. That would mean that Mr Sezer's successor would have to be elected under the old rules - that is to say, by MPs. But even if that does happen, a new AK goverment is more likely to opt a compromise candidate after their experience in April. That new president could then lead a debate on an elected president's powers. It would allow Turkey to make a calm and gradual transition to a public presidency, and bring to an end a debate that has raged long before Mr Sezer ever took office.

What do journalists know, anyway?

2007-06-10T21:57:00.000+03:00

Adnan Menderes is remembered with a combination of fondness and embarrasment in Turkey today. Embarrassment, because his government was toppled in Turkey's first military intervention since Ottoman times, and Menderes himself was tried and hung.

His death was either an accident or a convenient mistake, depending on your point of view. The telephones at the prison mysteriously went dead just before the execution, and a personal appeal from the president to halt the process never got through in time.

Today it is remembered as one of the darker chapters in Turkish history. Even the army has expressed regret. And Menderes's reputation is secure: after all, he headed Turkey's first successful opposition party and led the country through a decade of reform and development in the 1950s. His name now graces an airport and a university. That's the fondness. He will not be forgotten.

But for all his zealousness, Menderes was a stubborn man, and he didn't think much of the media either. He tightened press censorship laws in the latter half of his premiership, and made an especial effort to suppress - not ignore - criticism of his policies. It was partly this behaviour that alarmed military chiefs in the first place. He appeared to be openly challenging Atatürk's secular state without letting anyone else be open in their objections.

Menderes's style - his programme of reform, his outspoken character, his contempt for the press - has often been compared to the current prime minister. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sued many journalists and cartoonists over the past five years for personal denigration, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his efforts only grant his critics a wider audience. But he has made a handsome sum in compensation too.

Last month, The Economist took Turkey to its front cover with the headline "The battle for Turkey's soul". The leading article inside showed depth and a thorough understanding of Turkish politics, clearly written by someone living in, or at least familiar with the country. It came to the conclusion that "if Turks have to choose, democracy is more important than secularism". It encouraged the re-election of Mr Erdoğan's AK party on July 22nd.

What interested me about the piece was the reaction. Many people I spoke to were surprised at how blatantly the Economist aligned itself politically - newspapers in Turkey do show political leanings, but they are rarely arresting in their support.

Others were outraged at how a foreign publication could dare to comment on Turkish affairs. An NTVMSNBC report on the story is a telling example. "What right do the British have to comment?" says one particularly informed commenter from Ankara. "The British couldn't defeat the Turkish army (in 1923), so they are passing the task on to the AK party." Another asks the Economist when it will stop meddling in Turkey's internal affairs. There is also condemnation of British imperialism and vows to overcome it.

In 2005, a Swiss magazine quoted the author Orhan Pamuk as saying "Thirty thousand Kurds, and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody dares to talk about it." He was referring to Turkey. The words landed him in court, brought him several death threats and probably contributed to his Nobel literature prize last year. Many Turks were angry at his words, including President Sezer, who conspicuously failed to congratulate him on his Nobel victory.

In April of this year, Nokta magazine (see my picture, above) ran what it claimed were the diaries of a retired general, in which he purportedly says there had been plans for a military coup in 2004. The story caused quite a stir, particularly when the former chief of staff became suspiciously vague when asked to comment. It all culminated not in a full investigation - the army said the diaries were fake - but in a police raid of Nokta's headquarters. The magazine has since closed down, citing "pressures".

Journalism would not be journalism if it did not sometimes court controversy. A widely-read, stirring piece will always find an angry response from a disagreeing reader. But in Turkey, there is an ugly habit of directing that anger not at the opinion, but at the author himself. There is a tendency to approach criticism in a "one size fits all" manner; that is to say, that all critics are troublemakers.

This is wrong. Nokta should be able to publish without fear of a police raid. Orhan Pamuk should be able to say what he thinks without fear of a trial. The Economist should be able to publish its thoughts on Turkish politics, as it does for every country, without being labelled an imperialist tool.

The reality is that a harsly critical story can be ballooned into an act of treason, particularly if the author is not already well-known. It is as if freedom of speech applies only until the point of criticism, and anyone who crosses the line is a troublemaker.

I myself have been dismissed from a state broadcaster for criticising Turkish radio. When the director called me into his office to hand me my verbal notice, he did not comment on what I had written. Instead, he said: "You should have known this would happen. Well, you know now, and you won't do it again, but you have to go in any case."

What is interesting about all this is that it is a mindset. It is as if everybody knows there are certain lines that cannot be crossed, and if you do cross them you must be asking for trouble. What it boils down to is the Turkish state being suspicious of everyone - of Greeks, of Armenians, of Circassians, of the Alevi sect of Islam, of Kurds, and especially of Turks.

There is a solution, but it is not an easy one: people must learn to trust each other.

Pay attention. It's going to happen

2007-05-25T15:14:00.000+03:00

In London, from where I write this entry, the Iraq war has a numbing effect. Most people know it is happening, but rarely any longer do they acknowledge it. And after four years of death and destruction on an almost daily basis in a faraway land, they can hardly be blamed for it.

The mood is reflected in British TV news: Iraq does still feature in bulletins, but the reports of carnage normally appear in the middle, the least-watched bit, following all those stories about councils wanting to empty bins less frequently. It's not that people don't care, but they are numbed by the news that never differs.

But things are about to change in Iraq. It will not be a change for the better, and it will not come from America's Congress, with its new multi-billion dollar aid package, or from Iran, with its alleged backing of the insurgency. The change will come from Turkey, which is threatening to invade the north of Iraq. And anyone who remotely understands the region knows that Turkey can - and will - do it.

The predominantly Kurdish region of northern Iraq is a stark contrast to the rest of the country. While British and American troops face attacks by the day, the Kurds have set up a stable, autonomous government, with greater freedom than they ever had under Saddam Hussein. They even have one of their number as Iraqi president. Iraqi Kurdistan is a comfort to coalition forces, but Turkey wants to intervene.

Why? Because, largely unnoticed to the outside world, Turkey is under attack. Attacks against the state and army have been at least monthly occurences since the PKK renounced its unilateral ceasefire three years ago. Yesterday, six soldiers were killed by remote-controlled mine during a land search operation in the southeastern town of Şırnak. Even as I type, Turkish radio said that a state security chief in nearby Tunceli was targeted today in a bomb attack.

Turkey's army says the attacks come from secret bases over the border in northern Iraq. It accuses figures in the Kurdish administration, and even US military chiefs in the region, of turning a blind eye to their existence. The army chief, Yaşar Büyükanıt, said at a press conference on April 12 that a swift operation was needed to remove the bases and stop the attacks. The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has indicated in the last week that he agrees.

To put things in perspective, Turkey's southeast is not Iraq's southeast. The attacks are not as frequent, nor as reckless. They target security officials and soldiers, not civilians. The region is not the danger zone it was twenty years ago, and there is little talk of imposing another state of emergency. But none of this justifies the PKK attacks. They are still taking lives, and Turkey wants to stop them.

Both America and the Iraqi government in Baghdad have opposed the idea of a Turkish intervention for months. Both have favoured solving the problem among themselves, and there have been a number of three-way meetings. But the attacks have not stopped, and not a week has seemed to go by recently without television pictures of another flag-draped coffin being buried. No one was hurt in the Tunceli attack, but patience is wearing thin. Amid rising nationalism and anti-Americanism, more people than ever before are saying that Turkey needs to solve the problem alone. And with an election just around the corner, Mr Erdoğan might just agree.

No one doubts Turkey has the capability to strike northern Iraq. Its army, after all, is NATO's second largest. But it is hard not to feel that the United States is not taking the threat of an intervention seriously enough. It can happen, and unless something changes soon, it will happen. Someone needs to take notice.

Take note

2007-05-14T19:03:00.000+03:00

Two million people would not gather in five cities over three weeks if they didn't have something to say. Yesterday's Republican rally in the western city of Izmir was perhaps the most impressive of them all. Nearly a million people attended, forming the stunning sight of a sea of red Turkish flags contrasting with the brilliant blue of the Izmir bay.

"Turkey is secular, and shall remain so" has been the predominant chant at this and at previous rallies in Çanakkale, Manisa, Istanbul and the capital Ankara - all western cities. The protestors feel that with the recent presidential election Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's ruling AK party has taken one threatening step too many towards dismantling Atatürk's legacy. The intention is, they claim, to end the secular republic.

That would be a very difficult thing to do. The Kemalist legacy is embedded in Turkey's institutions: not a week goes by before children are reminded of it at school, and imams are instructed to preach it at Friday prayers across the country. You can't overturn that in a hurry.

One thing to consider would be whether AK really does want to end secularism. A recent Economist article would argue that evidence, so far, is to the contrary. The economy is riding high, the judiciary has been reformed, and ties with Europe are stronger than ever before. If AK truly is planning to instil sharia law the moment it takes the presidency, it's doing a very good job hiding it.

The Turkish people are better off than they were five years ago. Broadly speaking, they are happier, richer, and more likely to be in work than in 2002. Broadly speaking, this is down to the politicians in AK, who recognised what was needed and delivered it. Broadly speaking, they deserve to win the next election.

And win it they probably will, because Turkey is a country of such size and diversity that even two million is not an electoral liability. Notice, for instance, that the Republican rallies have all been in western cities (with the exception of an upcoming event in Samsun, on the eastern Black Sea coast). For all the millions who took to the streets, there are millions more who did not.

That is how some AK leaders have been consoling themselves over the past few weeks. They are wrong, and Mr Erdoğan should move to correct his party's position. He was wrong to treat the presidential election as if it were an internal primary. He should not have waited until the last minute, when tensions were at their peak, before consulting the opposition. Now, more than ever, Turkey needs a compromise candidate for president, and only Mr Erdoğan can start the process to find one. If there is to be a public vote for president on July 22nd, he must propose and nominate Hikmet Çetin.

AK cannot afford to ignore the secularist protests. That will only make things more difficult for them when they do return to government in July - especially if they need to seek a coalition partner.

This man is the real problem

2007-05-01T13:39:00.001+03:00

As the leader of the country's main opposition party, Deniz Baykal is in a position of exceptional influence. It is his responsibility to be something of a symbol of morality for the rest of us. He would be ill-advised, for instance, to be pictured smoking a cigarette. Or making a rude hand gesture. Or shunning an affectionate baby.

The same, you would think, would apply to respecting the country's state mechanisms. Surely it goes without saying that the CHP leader believes in the rule of law?

It appears not, acording to what he said yesterday: "If the Constitutional Court dismisses the CHP application, Turkey could be dragged towards conflict. It could lead to worse times." He seems to suggest that the court's decision is a matter of life and death. It is scaremongering rubbish and should not be taken seriously. Turkey is not going to descend into fighting in the streets and families torn apart over a court ruling. What should be taken seriously is the fact that the words were spoken at all.

I find it difficult to understand Mr Baykal's intent. If his statement is an assesment of the political climate, it is weak. If it is an attempt to influence the verdict, it is pitiful. If they were meant to be sage words of warning, they were anything but.

What Mr Baykal should have done is what the ruling AK party did after an internal meeting yesterday evening. "We cannot comment," a short statement said, "while the court process continues."

That court process is expected to be concluded tonight, whether it is in the early evening or in the early hours of Wednesday morning. It is certainly true that the verdict will shape Turkey's immediate future. A pro-AK ruling will effectively install Abdullah Gül in Çankaya as the next president; a pro-CHP ruling will thwart that. An early election is likely in both cases - not only, as Mr Baykal would have us believe, if AK is defeated.

Whatever verdict the court does reach, it must be an impartial one. It must be a decision reached without the influence of outsiders such as Mr Baykal. The trouble is, in a country like Turkey, you cannot be sure that will not happen.

As for Mr Baykal himself, his words have proven what we already knew: that he does not respect the very institution upon which he says the country's future hangs. "Instead of offering an alternative vision," said last week's Economist, "he has built a career on scaremongering. The EU is bent on dismembering Turkey, the Americans want to dilute Ataturk's legacy, the CIA is plotting to kill him — these are his tired mantras."

I would go further: Deniz Baykal is a thug. As the leader of the largest unreformed political party in Turkey, he is more adept at orchestrating the secular bloc he leads than recognising the needs of his people. This legal challenge is just the latest in a long series of attempts to force an early election. It looks like this time he has succeeded. The polls suggest that AK might lose some support at the next election, but they also suggest those supporters will not be flocking in their droves to the CHP. Mr Baykal should be worried.

This is not a crisis

2007-04-29T14:05:00.000+03:00

The past week will go down as one of the most exciting in Turkey's history. It began on Tuesday with the ruling AK party's nomination of foreign minister Abdullah Gül as its presidential candidate. It ended yesterday with a high court challenge and a stark military warning.

Here is what has happened in the last 48 hours: there were 361 votes cast in Friday's first round. Abdullah Gül received 357 votes, ten short of what he needed to win. Of the remaining four ballots, three were spoilt and one was blank.

The main opposition CHP took the election to the Constitutional Court, claiming the legal requirement for attendance (367 MPs, they say) was not met. AK says the 367 figure is irrelevant, but also slyly claims the attendance was 368, thanks to CHP members coming in to observe the ballot.

The court has promised a judgement before Wednesday's second round. If the CHP claim is upheld, the first round will be annulled and all further rounds cancelled. The likely route from there is an immediate general election. If, however, the court dismisses the CHP claim, Wednesday's second round will go ahead as planned, and Mr Gül will be elected president by round three, when the vote requirement is dropped to a simple majority of 276.

Hours after the CHP's case was handed to the court, the military weighed in. In a statement released at midnight, timed so that it would miss the evening news bulletins but appear on the morning front pages, the army said that the presidential election was turning into a discussion of the secular system. It went on: "The Turkish Armed Forces is watching the situation with concern. It must not be forgetten that the armed forces is party to these discussions and is the absolute guardian of secularism."

The government's response to the statement was just as blunt and angry: "We cannot accept an anti-government declaration from the General Staff, an office answerable to the prime minister. This midnight statement can only be interpreted as an attempt to influence the judicial process." The European Union responded too, saying that the presidential election was a test case for the army to respect democracy.

Today, tens of thousands of people have gathered in Istanbul for a secularist rally. It follows a similar demonstration in Ankara two weeks ago, when around 300,000 people attended to protest Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's potential candidacy.

Three important points must be made about this weekend's developments. Firstly, this is indeed the first presidential election in Turkey's history to be taken to court, but that is nothing to be ashamed of. Rather, it demonstrates that Turkey is a democratic state operating under the rule of law. Politicians frequently bicker; the fact that the judges have been called in to settle this dispute shows that power in Turkey does operate horizontally as well as vertically.

Second, there might be more to the army's position than meets the eye. It is true that this is the bluntest statement since Yaşar Büyükanıt became Chief of the General Staff, but it could have been a preemptive measure. Today's secularist rally is sure to feature demonstrators calling for the army to intervene. Perhaps the statement was designed to placate those demonstrators.

Where the army is most certainly wrong is in its resolute insistence that the secular system can never be up for discussion. To discuss does not mean to dismantle. In fact, discussion could strengthen the secular system. A public debate on the role of religion in the state can help remind Turks why secularism is important without having to resort to Kemalist dogma. More on that in a later post.

Third - this is not a crisis. It is a serious debate concerning issues far more fundamental than a voting technicality, but everyone is playing calmly and by the book. Talk of a direct military intervention is, at this stage, nothing but rumour.

It is difficult to predict what the Constitutional Court's decision - expected on Tuesday - will be. My personal opinion is that the CHP challenge is baseless, because the constitution contains nothing to suggest the attendance for a presidential vote should be any different from any other session. My feeling is that the case should be dismissed, but I cannot wholeheartedly say that I expect the court to rule against the CHP. As BadTyrpist wrote in a comment on Friday, the text of any pro-CHP ruling will have to be read very closely.

And the underdog withdraws

2007-04-27T15:55:00.000+03:00

Ersönmez Yarbay has just withdrawn from the election in support of Abdullah Gül. He had said earlier that he would do this if opposition parties boycotted the vote.

It has been a good publicity stunt for him, though.

The vote begins

2007-04-27T15:26:00.000+03:00

Parliament speaker Bülent Arınç has rejected a CHP application for attendance to be taken. There are nine non-AKP MPs in the chamber: five of them are independents, two are from Mehmet Ağar's DYP, and one each are from Anavatan and the CHP.

This would mean there are 361 MPs in parliament eligible for voting - six short of the number needed to vote in a president in the first round. A CHP legal challenge is now certain.

The voting continues.

Mumcu decides: We're out

2007-04-27T14:36:00.000+03:00

Erkan Mumcu, leader of parliament's third-placed Anavatan party, has just announced his party too will not be taking part in this afternoon's presidential election. Anavatan has twenty MPs in parliament.

Today's vote will be going ahead regardless. The CHP will be watching it very closely, and is to demand a register as soon as voting is over. Their legal challenge will most likely be launched before the day is over.

It is very unlikely now that Mr Gül will be elected in this round, or indeed in the second round, but the other AK candidate Ersönmez Yarbay did say he would withdraw if all the opposition parties boycott the vote. They have just done that.

AK party MPs have now started to enter the parliament chamber. It's probably a sensible idea: with, 353 of them, it must be a bit of a squeeze.

Electing number eleven

2007-04-27T14:10:00.000+03:00

The day has come. Turkey's 542 members of parliament have been called in for 3pm today to vote for the man they want to become the country's next president. They have a choice between two members of the ruling AK party. The first is the party's official candidate, foreign minister Abdullah Gül. The second is Ersönmez Yarbay, an Ankara MP not endorsed by the party. In this first round, a candiddate needs 367 votes to win.

The election is a critical one, perhaps the closest Turkey has ever seen, because each and every vote counts. Deniz Baykal, leader of the main opposition CHP, had said his party would boycott the vote long before Mr Gül's candidacy was even announced.

Mr Baykal has further threatened to take the election to the Constitutional Court, Turkey's highest judicial body, if there are not 367 MPs present when voting takes place. AK leaders have dismissed the threat as a technicality, pointing to the article in the constitution that say only 184 MPs are needed to start a session of parliament.

But despite the strong show, AK leaders have been shaken by the threat, and Mr Gül has visited opposition leaders in an attempt to find support. As it stands, AK has 353 seats in parliament. Parliament speaker Bülent Arınç will be leading the session, and therefore cannot vote. AK therefore needs at least fifteen other MPs to be present in the chamber, regardless of how they vote, to scupper a CHP legal challenge.

Mehmet Ağar, leader of the True Path party (DYP), has just appeared on television saying his party's four MPs will also not be taking part in the vote. Mr Ağar repeated his view that AK has a sufficient majority to get their candidate through in the third round, and that he did not believe the CHP's challenge was legitimate.

Mr Ağar's words have added weight because his party has agreed to operate in conjunction with Erkan Mumcu's Motherland party for this vote. Mr Mumcu himself is due to give a press conference at 2.30pm - he is expected to give his twenty MPs a free vote.

AK have also failed to win support from the Youth Party, Social Democrat People's Party or the People's Ascent Party, all of which have a seat each.

Mr Gül has been meeting independent MPs in an attempt to add up the numbers. There are also reports of CHP MPs breaking away from party lines to attend the vote.

It's tense. I'll bring more soon.

Now we know

2007-04-24T12:14:00.000+03:00

Foreign minister Abdullah Gül was revealed as the unexpected, but not entirely surprising AK party presidential candidate just a few minutes ago. Mr Gül's name was announced by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to rapturous applause at a meeting of the party's MPs.

Also confirmed is the election schedule: the first round of voting will be held this coming Friday 27th April, with the next three rounds taking place on May 2nd, May 9th and May 15th. The likelihood is that Mr Gül will be elected in the third round on May 9th, when he will need 276 votes, a simple majority, rather than the two-thirds majority of 367 required in the first two rounds.

It must be a sad loss for those who work at the Foreign Ministry - they are parting with one of the most competent foreign ministers in Turkey's recent history. Speculation in Ankara will in time surely turn to who might become his successor, though for now even the relentless gossiper should be satisfied. It is also important to acknowledge what Mr Erdoğan has done: by rejecting the presidency for himself, he has avoided the Turgut Özal scenario. It was a shrewd move and should not go unnoticed.

However, there are some serious questions that need to be addressed very soon. Some columnists have said that this election has paralysed the business of government. This is true to a certain extent, but only natural. After all, this is the selection of a man who will see through not just the general elections this November, but also those that follow five years afterwards. A much more serious issue is the presidential election process itself. It is vital that this becomes the last time Turkey's president is elected indirectly.

Turkey is functioning free democracy - the diversity of press coverage during the last few months is testament to that - but the country's presidency is not. The system must be changed well before 2014 to ensure the country's top man is elected directly by the Turkish people. The AKP certainly has the parliamentary majority to make such a change - is it too optimistic to hope it could happen before November?

A more detailed assessment of Abdullah Gül's presidency will follow shortly. For now though, here's something to think about: we all know that Mrs Abdullah Gül wears a headscarf, but fewer might remember that she took Turkey to the European Court of Human Rights in 2002 over the headscarf ban in universities. She withdrew her case after her husband became prime minister. Mr Gül said at the time that it was because the matter had become a political issue rather than a judicial one.

It seems the matter of headscarves is to become another public debate. That can only be a good thing.

Is this Turkey's new president?

2007-04-24T00:57:00.000+03:00

April 23rd is always a funny day in Turkey. It is national holiday because it marks the day, now eighty-seven years ago, when the National Assembly was founded in Ankara, formally breaking away from the Sultan's government in Istanbul. The man who orchestrated that break, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, dedicated the day to all children, which is why it is known throughout the country as "April 23rd National Sovereignty and Children's Day".

The drill tends to be pretty much the same each year. In the morning, the prime minister announces to a mass of reporters that he is handing over his duties, albeit temporarily, to a child. The new junior prime minister then speaks of his hopes for Turkey's future, and takes a few light-hearted questions from the press. In the afternoon, there are festivals and performances by children at stadia across the country.

By the evening, it is time to mark that serious business of national sovereignty, with a reception at parliament. These have been strained affairs since the AK party's election, with intense speculation on whether any headscarved wives might turn up, and why the prime minister so insists on wearing a necktie rather than a bow tie. This year, as day eight of presidential nominations drew to a close, things were a little different. The AK MPs gathered at the reception (opposition attendance was particularly low) were guessing who they thought the next Commander-in-Chief was to be.

The name on many people's lips was Vecdi Gönül. The defence minister, who stood for president in 2000 and withdrew only after Ahmet Necdet Sezer's name was thrown into the ring, is not a complete surprise. He had been included several weeks ago in an internal AK party survey of potential candidates. His cabinet portfolio certainly makes him more acceptable to military chiefs. Oh, and his wife doesn't wear a headscarf.

Parliament speaker Bülent Arınç confirmed that a name had been decided: "I know who the candidate is. I am comfortable." Such a pity he could not spill the beans and let the rest of feel that. One of the reporters swarming around the parliament speaker, perhaps also frustrated, tried to egg him on by calling him "Mr President". Mr Arınç's response was clear and staccato: "Don't twist words. I know I am one of the candidates. I was informed of the candidate today. I know the candidate. I am comfortable. Wonderful things will happen."

Is that candidate Vecdi Gönül?

There are, as ever, other names swirling around. One that has been spoken quite often is Nimet Çubukçu, the cabinet minister for women and family affairs. When asked, all she would do was ask for "a little more patience", nothing more. She tried to parry the questions by saying she had a cold, and was not feeling particularly well. There are some countries where that sort of answer is enough to declare you unfit for the job.

With just under 48 hours to go until nominations close, the AK candidate seems decided. All that remains now is for the name to be revealed, and it is the prime minister who has the pleasure - and the discretion - to make the announcement. Some do think the name will be revealed at a parliamentary group meeting tomorrow, but it seems more likely that it will be held off until Wednesday. Following that, the first round of voting could be as early as Thursday.

You can't deny it, it's democracy in action.

Presidential nominations: day six

2007-04-21T12:57:00.000+03:00

The halfway point has now been crossed in the period to nominate candidates for Turkey's presidency. This morning, the official candidate count stands at zero, the number declared is no greater than two, and the speculation for others is more intense than ever before.

The deadline for nominating candidates is, as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has often reminded us, midnight on the evening of Wednesday 25th April. Not one person has gone to the specially allocated office in the Turkish parliament to nominate either themselves or another, although yesterday the first MP to declare revealed himself to the press.

Ersönmez Yarbay (right) is an AK party deputy for Ankara. He told excited reporters yesterday that he was putting himself forward because he was feeling increasingly uncomfortable at the lack of candidates. His candidacy should be taken about as seriously as that of Metin Uca, the former gameshow host who fielded himself as a compromise candidate a couple of weeks ago.

Both say they are compromise candidates: Mr Uca says he is not an MP and has a greater chance of being politically neutral, while Mr Yarbay says he will go and register if no other AK man does. The problem is not whether an AK deputy will register. Everybody knows there will be somebody; it is now a question of who, and when.

Mr Erdoğan's candidacy is still nothing but guesswork. I myself am still not committed on the issue. Just on Thursday, I was convinced that he would be running after his notable absence - and foreign minister Abdullah Gül's notable presence - at a meeting announcing Turkey's EU reform programme. But this morning's papers have the story of a group of Istanbul fishermen happily greeting the prime minister rather than the president. Mr Erdoğan apparently welcomed the sentiments. Oh, I am confused.

The other substantial development in Ankara yesterday was a meeting between Mr Gül and parliament speaker Bülent Arınç. Both men left the meeting saying they were concerned at the level of media speculation, that there were no differences of opinion between them or with Mr Erdoğan, and that the two of them were agreed upon the same candidate. Of course, they did not say who that candidate might be.

So as we enter day six, there is little new of substance to report. Mr Erdoğan is still the leading candidate, in that there is no doubt he will win if he runs. Mr Arınç and Mr Gül are second-placed. The other serious AK candidates are those whose wives don't wear headscarves. There is also talk of an woman candidate - Nimet Çubukçu, the cabinet minister for women and family affairs, would be the obvious AK choice there.

There is still faint hope of a compromise candidate, selected from outside parliament. Some newspapers have picked up on the speculation this morning: Sabah's headline is "I wouldn't object to a fourth candidate", quoting Mr Arınç yesterday, while Star went for "Everyone will be astonished", saying Mr Erdoğan feels their candidate will be a surprise choice.

Has anyone heard from Hikmet Çetin recently?

Siamese observations

2007-04-13T11:08:00.000+03:00

(this entry was written late last night)
Two press conferences, two different leaders, two very different styles. The country's best reporters were already poised for a press conference from Turkey's army chief, Yaşar Büyükanıt, which was to address issues that "the public needs to know about". What everyone wanted to know what whether General Büyükanıt would clear up his position on the presidential election - Radikal, for instance, went this morning with the headline "What will he say to the Çankaya question?"

Barely a half hour before General Büyükanıt began, parliament speaker (and rumoured presidential candidate) Bülent Arınç was just finishing a press conference of his own, and it was interesting to see how the two leaders compared.

Bülent Arınç's command of Turkish is what I would call near-perfect. He is articulate, has an excellent tone and speaks practically without hesitation. His press conference was similarly well-handled: he made his statement on Saturday's rally in Ankara, with his pauses as if timed to complete a soundbite, and then took questions from reporters. He gave absolutely nothing away about his potential candidacy.

Yaşar Büyükanıt's press conference, on the other hand, lasted well over an hour and was spectacularly successful in recreating the "bored in the classroom" effect. That was until around three o'clock, when he announced that he was fully in favour of sending Turkish troops into northern Iraq. It wasn't a particularly surprising revelation, but producers at the umpteen television channels showing the conference took the opportunity to splash "breaking news" captions on the screen. Perhaps they were trying to make things a little more exciting.

What interested me was the stark difference in style: where Mr Arınç was succinct and to the point, General Büyükanıt resorted to those outstretched Turkish sentences that seem to knock down all hope of a full stop any time soon. While Mr Arınç had me hanging on to his every word, General Büyükanıt frequently made me pick up this morning's Radikal, trying to remember why I was watching him.

Bülent Arınç is, of course, not the first smooth talker of Turkish politics. But it can't have only been me who has noticed that more and more politicians seem to have that gift of talking directly to the public, while those traditional stalwarts of the state bring us all back to school in an instant.

No doubt the Büyükanıt conference was the leading story of the day, and it deserved the near-blanket coverage it received in the evening news bulletins. But I just wonder - if the speaker's conference had somehow been shown first, how many viewers would have switched over when the general came on?

It's fascism! It must be!

2007-04-06T14:05:00.000+03:00

(written on the morning of Wednesday 4th April)
A number of newspapers were taken aback by the surprise decision on Sunday to requisition the property of Ciner media group. The state's Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF) seized 63 companies, including Sabah, which has a somewhat unfair reputation as the housewives' newspaper, and atv television, one of Turkey's "big four". The reason for the swoop was a series of secret - and apparently illegal -agreements signed between the group's owner, Turgay Ciner, and former chairman Dinç Bilgin.

There was outrage at the decision yesterday. "The TMSF's executive is tied to the government" was Cumhuriyet's claim yesterday, quoting an opposition MP. "The Fund's broader authority should be examined." In plain English - or Turkish, as it were - the opposition believes the government has seized Sabah and atv for propaganda purposes, just months before the general election.

This isn't the first media group to be impounded in recent years. In 2004, the TMSF seized the assets of the Uzan group, which included television and radio stations, newspapers and Telsim, the country's second largest mobile phone operator. The companies all went into public ownership for a number of months before being sold off individually. Star TV, another of Turkey's big four channels, went to the Doğan Group; the newspaper of the same name went to Turkish Cypriot businessman; and Telsim was sold off after a fierce bidding war to Vodafone.

The TMSF promises that, like the Uzan assets, the Ciner companies will be sold off in a few months. But that hasn't stopped politicians from accusing the government of orchestrating the media.

"The press should not be under government control," insisted DYP leader Mehmet Ağar. "Regardless of what is said now, (the companies) will still be in government control". The deputy leader of the far-right Nationalist Action Party declared it "a crime against democracy", in a comment that not enough people snorted at. And Kemal Anadol, head of the main opposition CHP's parliamentary group, went so far as to use the F-word: "There is intent here to keep the press under unilateral pressure, to suppress the opposition. It is a fascist mind that is doing this."

Many seem to have forgotten in the scramble to cry "media intervention!" that the Ciner group was impounded on suspicion of dodgy deals. Tax avoidance continues to be a big problem in Turkey; the greatest culprits have been some of the country's largest holding companies. Putting an end to their dirty work can only be a good thing.

Anavatan's leader, Erkan Mumcu, seemed to be the only voice of reason in all this. He said the reasons behind the operation were not yet clear, and it would not be right to comment until the court case is over. Perhaps more of us should listen to him.

Presidential election: the candidates (part two)

2007-03-26T23:52:00.000+03:00

Sometimes, to see if things are really changing, it helps to leave a marker behind you as you walk along. This is what I did last week when I produced a brief guide to the candidates, as speculated by the media at the time. How things can change in a week.

The biggest development is that Bülent Arınç, the parliament speaker, appears to have pulled out. Or so the press seem to think. He was on Italian television over the weekend, and when the interviewer began by asking whether he was addressing Turkey's future president, Mr Arınç said "no".

But it's not entirely a wrap: when the interviewer asked, "Not even theoretically?" Mr Arınç said that any MP could theoretically be a candidate, and "as parliament speaker my potential ratio might be a little higher". Nothing clearer there, then.

Elsewhere, the presidential campaign has its first officially declared candidate. Metin Uca, who until recently spent his days lecturing the ills of contestants on his TRT-1 gameshow, has thrown his hat into an otherwise empty ring. "I have had a positive response from parliament's liberal MPs. I have (the support of) 110 MPs, including some from the governing party," he told reporters last week. "I am serious and confident."

With just over two weeks to go until nominations open, here my revised list of official and potential candidates:

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prime minister, AKP — was urged by today's Financial Times not to stand.

Bülent Arınç, parliament speaker, AKP — appeared to signal he would not stand, but who knows for certain?

Abdullah Gül, foriegn minister, AKP

Vecdi Gönül, defence minister, AKP

Beşir Atalay, state minister, AKP

Hikmet Çetin, former CHP leader and foreign minister — remains this blog's candidate.

Ertuğrul Yalçınbayır, MP for Bursa, AKP

Metin Uca, journalist and former gameshow host — declared last week, claims to have the support of 110 MPs.

The thin red line

2007-03-25T14:11:00.000+03:00

Turkey's national football team came back yesterday from a goal down in Athens to defeat Greece 1-4. It was a convincing victory, taking Turkey three points clear at the top of its Euro 2008 qualifying group, and leaving the last European Champions with plenty to think about. Thousands of Turkey fans, as is traditional, took to the streets with their flags and loud voices to celebrate the victory.

Such a pity there was more to it than the football.

"Love thy neighbour as thyself" - part of Christianity's commandments - is an oft-used phrase in Britain. Most British people do take it to heart, in spite of conflicts over garden fences, mumblings over how differently they behave, and fierce arguments about who has a suspiciously greener lawn during a hosepipe ban.

The principle applies on a wider scale, too. Britain and France have a history of bloody warfare, and despite fighting two World Wars alongside each other there remains little (cultural) love lost between the two.

Greece and Turkey are not much different from the cross-channel entente. They argue over their fences (the Aegean), mutter over their petty differences (Greek delight, anyone?) and clash over the fortunes of their backyards (Cyprus). A football match between the two was sure to be charged - neither side had beaten the other in a competitive match since 1949 - but yesterday's Turkish sports newspapers told a different story.

Fanatik yesterday splashed a huge Turkish flag on its front cover with one of Atatürk's less endearing quotations: "the power you need exists in the noble blood of your veins". Fotomaç too used the some quotation. Onikinci Adam went with another Atatürk quotation rallying the Turkish youth, while Fotospor opted for the stereotype: "We'll puncture Athens, we'll kiss Yorgo". The tone was one of going to war.

Fotospor's eloquence continued in this morning's edition with "Be quiet and kneel" next to a picture of the Greek goalkeeper on his knees after conceding a goal. Fotomaç, awash in red, had another Kemalism - "Happy is the one who calls himself a Turk" - while Fanatik's headline was "Here are Mustafa Kemal's children".

Turkey's sports newspapers aren't exactly aimed at an intellectual audience. They aren't all that balanced either - all are heavily football-orientated, and the bulk of their pages cover the country's biggest teams: Beşiltaş, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe. Most also contain advertisements for pornographic hotlines on their inner pages. But they do sell well - Fanatik, for instance, shifts nearly 200,000 copies daily - and a rallying cry before a national football match has certainly been published before.

But what if things had turned violent in Athens, before or after the game? How inappropriate would the headlines be seen, had the fans clashed overnight? There is a broader question to ask as well - what do the headlines say about the recent upsurge in Turkish nationalism?

Today's Birgün quotes Yüksel Gülsoy, of Fotomaç, as saying, "These are the basic elements used in a national match. It is called a national match, after all. These are words that have been used hundreds of times over. In our match with Greece these words must be seen as empty."

Birgün - itself an independent newspaper with a tiny readership - describes the events as provocation. At a time when the traditional Turkish hospitality towards foreigners has never been quite as patchy, it is difficult to gauge whether the front pages demonstrate football hooliganism or rampant nationalism.

Presidential election: the candidates

2007-03-18T17:37:00.000+02:00

In less than a month from now, the process for the election of a new Turkish president gets underway. From Monday 16th April, MPs will have ten days to nominate their man for the top job. Elections to the post will take place in the twenty days that follow.

A candidate needs a two-thirds majority to win. If no one person receives that after the first two rounds, the winning threshold is dropped to a simple majority for the next. The ruling AK party doesn't quite have two thirds of all the votes in parliament, but they do have a comfortable majority. Few commentators think the election itself will last more than three rounds.

It is perfectly clear how the president will be elected, but still not clear who. The AK majority makes it almost certain that one of their number will get the job. The party circulated an internal survery only last week asking members which party figure they would prefer as president. On the list were five cabinet members, including the prime minsiter, but two prominent members of the AK administration were absent.

So with the confusion reigning supreme, here's my guide to a few of the many candidates to become Turkey's 11th president:

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prime minister, AKP — mooted for months as his party's natural candidate. Would certainly be elected if he runs, but is very strongly opposed by Deniz Baykal's CHP. Has also been urged by high-ranking members of his own party to serve another five years as prime minister.

Bülent Arınç, parliament speaker, AKP — At the centre of intense media speculation. He is something of an unofficial leader of the party's more religious wing. Likely to face intense opposition from the military. Was noticably absent from the AKP's internal survey.

Abdullah Gül, foriegn minister, AKP — A former (temporary) prime minister and number two in the government, he is more likely to be in the running for prime minister again if Mr Erdoğan becomes president. Noticably absent from the AKP internal survey.

Vecdi Gönül, defence minister, AKP — His portfolio puts him in daily contact with military figures, which could suggest an indirect way of being groomed for the job. His wife doesn't wear a headscarf. Could be given illicit approval by the military. Present on the AKP internal survey. Serious contender.

Beşir Atalay, state minister, AKP — Also present on the AKP survey. His wife doesn't wear the dreaded headscarf. Not a particularly remarkable figure.

Hikmet Çetin, former CHP leader and foreign minister — this blog's candidate. Has kept something of a low profile recently. Unlikely candidate, as Bülent Arınç has said the next president will not be elected from outside parliament.

Ertuğrul Yalçınbayır, MP for Bursa, AKP — defected from Anavatan to the AKP in 2001. Endorsed by Anavatan leader Erkan Mumcu, who defected with him and then defected back. An outside possibility, perhaps?

Missing from this list is the main opposition CHP's candidate. Deniz Baykal has been very vocal in who he doesn't want to see as president - namely, Mr Erdoğan - but he's been far quieter in who he does support. Mr Mumcu has urged him to co-operate in naming a joint opposition candidate, but there seems to be no sign of that happening yet.

Your comments are welcome.