by Derek Davison
After a campaign involving a corruption investigation and nation-wide bans on social media, and an election day marred by deadly violence, Sunday’s municipal elections in Turkey resulted in what appears to have been a clear victory for Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
After a campaign involving a corruption investigation and nation-wide bans on social media, and an election day marred by deadly violence, Sunday’s municipal elections in Turkey resulted in what appears to have been a clear victory for Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). The outcome is expected to boost Erdogan’s stature leading up to August’s presidential election, in which he is expected to run, and it seems to have encouraged him to continue the draconian measures he has employed to counter internal opposition.
Erdogan has been under fire over his response to the Gezi Park protests that began last summer, and what is seen as his increasingly authoritarian governing approach. Initially focused on the decision to pave over an Istanbul park, the protests were violently cracked down upon, which helped widen them into a general opposition movement against Erdogan’s government. Turkish press freedoms have been severely curtailed, while the government has moved to tighten its control over the judiciary. More recently, Erdogan has been challenged by a corruption investigation, in particular over an alleged scheme to bypass international sanctions against Iran that involved top officials in the Turkish government and banking industry. Erdogan responded to the scandal by firing dozens of police officials who had been pursuing the investigation, and then by attempting to block access to Twitter and YouTube nationwide, after sensitive documents and recordings related to the investigation were leaked to the public via the social media sites.
Yet Sunday’s election results demonstrate that Erdogan still has popular support, especially given that Erdogan was heavily involved in the campaign despite not being on the ballot himself. The AKP came to power in 2002 promising to improve Turkey’s economy and to remove harsh and unpopular restrictions on religion in public life; their considerable success on both counts helps to explain their continued popularity. While there were scattered reports of voting irregularities, particularly in Ankara where the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) declared its plans to appeal the results, there is little reason to doubt AKP’s victory, although press restrictions certainly color the outcome.
Despite calls for national reconciliation, Erdogan‘s victory speech strongly hinted that he views AKP’s electoral success as a mandate to pursue additional harsh measures against his opponents. He declared that “the nation has foiled insidious plans and immoral traps,” and suggested that his opponents might “flee” in the face of forthcoming criminal charges against them. In the past Erdogan has argued that a vast international conspiracy involving the CIA, Western media, international bankers, and “the Jewish diaspora” is behind the opposition to his government. But his primary targets are the Turkish “deep state” and the so-called “Gulen movement.”
The “deep state” is the predominantly military “shadow government” that has existed since Turkey was founded in 1923 and has worked behind the scenes to destabilize or remove perceived threats to Turkey’s secular order, including elected governments that were seen as too religious. The Turkish military has led three coups against elected governments over the history of the Turkish republic, and exerted considerable influence over several others. The AKP came to power with the intention of reducing the influence of the deep state, and Erdogan has used the possibility of Turkey’s entry into the European Union (whose conditions for admission include guarantees of democracy and the rule of law) to keep the army from interfering in politics. However he has prosecuted several high-ranking military officers on suspicion of scheming to overthrow the civilian government, most recently last August when several active and retired generals, journalists, and academics were sentenced to life in prison for an alleged coup plot.
The Gulen movement is a group, also known as “Hikmet,” founded by former Imam Fethullah Gulen, whose teachings have attracted millions of followers in the Islamic World and particularly in Turkey (Gulen himself lives in self-imposed exile in the United States). Gulen’s followers initially allied themselves with Erdogan and the AKP against the deep state, but the two groups have fallen out of favor with one another. Gulen is thought to have several followers among Turkey’s police and judicial ranks, and Erdogan has accused them (and, by extension, Gulen himself) of manufacturing the corruption investigation to destabilize the government, a charge that Gulen denies. Meanwhile, Gulen has been highly critical of Erdogan’s governing style, accusing him of employing “authoritarian measures…to govern Turkey,” and of building a “cult of personality…around himself.”
Erdogan’s attempt to ban social media may have finally severed his relationship with Turkey’s current president, fellow AKP leader Abdullah Gul. Gul had been a close Erdogan ally, who served as Turkey’s prime minister from 2002-2003 when Erdogan was banned from participating in Turkish politics, and then as Erdoğan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister before assuming the presidency in 2007. However, during the height of the Gezi Park protests Gul emerged as a voice of opposition to the police crackdown, and more recently he opposed Erdogan’s Twitter ban and directly challenged Erdogan’s assertions that an international conspiracy is behind the allegations against his government. Gul has said nothing about his plans, but he is eligible for a second term in office, and while there has been talk of him assuming the role of prime minister while Erdogan becomes president (with expanded powers), the possibility of AKP’s two most prominent figures running against each other cannot be ruled out.
The coming presidential election will be the first popular presidential election in Turkey’s history. The results of Sunday’s election suggest that Erdogan would be the presumptive front-runner even against the also-popular Gul. However, if Gul runs he may benefit from having distanced himself from Erdogan’s more extreme recent actions. Any further developments in the corruption case against Erdogan could also impact the upcoming election, but at this point it seems unlikely that Erdogan will allow that investigation to continue.
]]>Since the advent of the Syrian Revolution and tightening transatlantic sanctions against Iran in 2011, Tehran and Ankara have had a particularly tough time maintaining a facade of mutual amity and cooperation.
Last December, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hastily cancelled a cultural trip to Turkey, where he was scheduled to meet [...]]]>
Since the advent of the Syrian Revolution and tightening transatlantic sanctions against Iran in 2011, Tehran and Ankara have had a particularly tough time maintaining a facade of mutual amity and cooperation.
Last December, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hastily cancelled a cultural trip to Turkey, where he was scheduled to meet Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of a ceremony commemorating the 13th century Persian poet Jalal al-din Rumi. While Iran’s Mehr News Agency cited Ahmadinejad’s busy agenda as a pretext for the decision, it is widely believed that it came in response to the Iranian regime’s admonition of the Turkish agreement to install NATO Patriot Missiles on its Southern border with Syria.
Then, earlier this year, Turkish President Abdullah Gül, in an interview with Foreign Affairs, went as far as to say, “Turkey will not accept a neighboring country possessing weapons not possessed by Turkey herself…we are not underestimating this matter in any way.” What is striking about his statement is not so much the knee-jerk anti-proliferation diplomatic correctness echoed among NATO members’ officials, but rather the emphasis on the regional balance of power: Turkey will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon because that would mean Turkish vulnerability and Iranian superiority.
These tit-for-tat expressions of disenchantment underline the degree to which Turkish-Iranian relations have entered a renewed period of estrangement, after years of progressive rapprochement between Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Iran’s clerical establishment, which saw Ankara emerge as Tehran’s key energy partner as well as interlocutor with Washington.
Although the recent discord is neither a novelty (the Safavid and Ottoman empires competed for regional hegemony for centuries) nor a big surprise, what is most astonishing is how the very same issues that served as the linchpin of Iran-Turkish partnership in recent years — namely Syria and the Iranian nuclear conundrum — are now pitting the two neighbors against each other.
Yet one thing that continues to bind the two countries is the simple, old-fashioned issue of hydro carbon riches. This is precisely why both sides continue to exercise caution with their mutual engagements, including Syria’s future, despite occasional rhetorical flare-ups. Indeed, Turkey has heavily resisted Washington’s recent calls for reduction of energy imports from Iran (and the suspension of precious metals trade as payment), underscoring the importance of bilateral energy relations.
However, with the Iranian nuclear saga entering a crucial stage of high-stakes negotiations this year, and the Syrian revolution turning into an all-out civil war, both sides are headed for a decisive moment in their bilateral ties.
As early as 2010, Iran and Turkey projected an image of solid partnership, anchored on a straightforward bargain: Turkey needed Iran for energy security and international influence while Tehran needed its neighbor to resist sanctions and reach out to the West. The partnership, albeit transient and conditional, was multifaceted, covering a variety of issues ranging from trade, finance and energy to cultural exchanges and politico-security cooperation.
While Turkish and Iranian security forces are said to have jointly engaged Kurdish separatist groups on multiple occasions, Ankara has also played a prominent role in facilitating Iran-West nuclear talks, culminating in the 2010 Brazil-Turkey-sponsored nuclear swap deal, followed by the Istanbul I (2011) and Istanbul II (2012) high-level nuclear talks between Iran and the 6-world powers P5+1 group.
However, at the heart of their relationship lies a key economic issue: (i) Turkey’s high energy import-dependence, 93 percent in oil and 95 percent in natural gas (2008 figures) and (ii) its over-reliance, in that regard, on Russia, from which it imported 66 percent of its gas in 2005. While Iran’s vast hydrocarbon reserves are important to Turkey’s energy security, the two sides have also laid their gaze on a broader trans-regional pipeline network, which could transform both sides into global energy brokers. In 2011, bilateral trade stood at more than $16 billion, projected to expand up to $30 billion in 2015.
But by mid-2011, a promising partnership appeared to be heading for the rocks. Turkey agreed to station a NATO missile defense shield on its Eastern borders, despite Iran’s vehement opposition, prompting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s (IRGC) aerospace chief, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, to warn, “Should we be threatened, we will target NATO’s missile defense shield in Turkey and then hit the next targets.” This was followed by another incident wherein Iranian security-intelligence personnel temporarily detained and interrogated three Turkish academics on charges of espionage. Then, under US pressure, Ankara reduced its Iranian oil imports by as much as 20 percent, followed by prevarications on its willingness to act as a financial intermediary — through the state-owned Halk bank — to process Iran’s multi-billion oil trade deals with countries such as India — in effect, contributing to the economic siege on Iran.
As the Syrian revolution turned more violent and Turkey transformed into the Free Syrian Army’s (FSA) main foreign patron, bilateral ties suffered further, with the Iranian Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Seyed Hassan Firouzabadi ominously warning Turkey, “it will be its turn [if it continues to] to help advance the warmongering policies of the United States in Syria.” To up the ante, Iran suspended visa-free arrangements with Turkey and hinted at potentially downgrading security cooperation with Ankara, perhaps on the Kurdish issue.
Turkish officials struck back, accusing Iran of hosting PKK rebels and contributing to the oppression of the Syrian people. Then came Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç’s warning that his country would do “whatever is required” to counter the Iranian threat, ignoring incessant efforts by Iran’s foreign ministry to downplay statements from the security branches. To cool bilateral tensions, Ahmadinejad extended a letter of invitation to his Turkish counterpart to attend the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit in Tehran, to no avail. A few months later, when Turkey responded to Syrian artillery attacks by agreeing to host Patriot missile-defense systems, Iran — along with Russia — criticized the decision vehemently, fearing Ankara (or NATO) could also use it against Tehran in the future.
Depending on how the Syrian conflict unfolds, as well as the dynamics of the Iranian nuclear program, we may be entering a renewed phase of confrontation between the two powers in which either side can inflict considerable damage on the other. Serious recognition of that fact by leaders in both countries may yet work to stabilize an increasingly volatile relationship.
Photo: Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim (L), Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (C), Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2nd L), Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan (2nd R) and Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu hold their hands as sign of unity during the 32nd Meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of G-15 in Tehran May 17, 2010. REUTERS/Morteza Nikoubazl (IRAN – Tags: POLITICS ENERGY)
]]>She said:
We reaffirmed our [...]]]>
She said:
We reaffirmed our determination and commitment to seek an early negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue and focused our discussion on further practical steps to achieve it at an early date.
And
We are ready to engage with Iran in the context of implementing the understandings reached during the Geneva meeting of 1 October 2009, and look forward to an early meeting of the E3+3 with Iran.
The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) called attention to the P5+1’s endorsement of the fuel swap agreement proposed at the Geneva meeting and the lack of any reference to the fuel swap deal brokered by Turkey and Brazil.
An ISIS statement read:
The P5+1 statement underlines the preference of the world powers to negotiate with Iran on a broader set of issues including the nuclear standoff, and to keep discussions on a fuel swap deal under its auspices, rather than a separate group involving Turkey and Brazil, which Iran has sought to bring in to talks.
The Geneva fuel swap agreement had stalled and, in May, a Brazilian and Turkish brokered deal received a tepid response from the White House and the UN Security Council, though it was endorsed by a leading retired U.S. diplomat and a group of proliferation experts.
Still, both the P5+1 and Iran put emphasis on diplomacy and negotiating a fuel swap agreement during this week’s meeting of the UN General Assembly.
At a breakfast meeting on Tuesday with journalists, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for new negotiations.
The Wall Street Journal’s Farnaz Fassihi wrote:
Mr. Ahmadinejad said the only path forward for the two nations was one of “dialogue based on respect and justice.”
And, in an interview in the Washington Post, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said:
]]>On the Iranian nuclear issue, we have the capacity to help and I believe the U.S. administration has understood that, and they want us to continue to go that route.