The Furious Passage of Tayyip Erdogan
This is a guest column written by Robert Ellis; he is a regular commenter on Turkish affairs in the Danish press and his columns appeared in Turkish Daily News (now Hurriyet English) regularly.
The Furious Passage of Tayyip Erdogan
By Robert Ellis
Turkey’s prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, is not a man who brooks being contradicted and a panel debate on the Gaza war at the World Economic Forum was no exception. What was hoped to be a bridge-building exercise to ameliorate Erdogan’s harsh criticisms of Israel’s incursion into Gaza and support for Hamas has turned out to be a public relations disaster.
Erdogan delivered his own presentation in a forceful tone, calling for Hamas to be included in the solution and expressing Turkey’s willingness to be included in the process. However, after Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, had made his presentation, Erdogan responded with a tirade against Peres but was reminded by the moderator of a time limit. Erdogan pushed the moderator away, rose to his feet and left the stage, declaring he did not think he would be coming back to Davos, because he had not been allowed to speak.
The reaction has not been long coming. This morning AJC, the American Jewish Committee, issued a statement calling Tayyip Erdogan’s attack “a public disgrace” and “gasoline on the fire of surging anti-Semitism”. Furthermore, last week AJC and four other American Jewish organizations sent a letter to Erdogan, expressing concern over the current wave of anti-Semitism in Turkey, and Erdogan’s outburst has done nothing to allay these fears.
Unfortunately the Turkish prime mnister has a track record of shooting himself in the foot, which, if the sport became an Olympic discipline, would guarantee him a number of gold medals.
At the EU summit in Copenhagen in December, 2002, when Turkey tried to press the EU to fix a date for starting accession talks, European leaders were shocked by Turkey’s “blackmail campaign”, and one prime minister called Erdogan’s behaviour “very counter-productive”. The French prime minister, Jacques Chirac, a representative of Old Europe, told a summit dinner: “It’s not enough to respect European law, you also have to be polite and civilized”.
At the EU summit two years later, when Turkey was finally given a starting date, Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, declared “We were gobsmacked”, when at the end of the summit Erdogan suddenly refused to recognize Cyprus. The summit was almost derailed, and Erdogan’s volte-face caused Asselborn to remark: “We are not carpet dealers here in Europe.”
The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, also experienced the Turkish leader’s abrasive style when Erdogan paid an official visit to Denmark in November 2005. After lunch there should have been a joint press conference, but when Erdogan learned that there would be a representative of the Kurdish tv station, Roj-tv, present, he immediately left for the airport, leaving Fogh Rasmussen to stand alone on the podium like an abandoned bride at the altar.
A fortnight ago Tayyip Erdogan paid his first visit to Brussels since the EU summit in December 2004 to revive Turkey’s flagging hopes of EU membership, but he immediately started off on the wrong foot. In a thinly veiled threat he informed the European Commission that he would review his support for the Nabucco gas pipeline if Cyprus continued to block the opening of the energy chapter of its accession talks. José Manuel Barroso, the EU Commission’s president, dismissed any connection between the two issues, and Erdogan, backtracking, declared that the project had enjoyed Turkey’s full support “all the time”.
At the same time Erdogan used his Brussels visit to express his support for Hamas, and called on Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and the whole world to respect the election results as the will of the people “so that democracy could win in the Palestinian Autonomy and not to satisfy Mahmoud Abbas”.
Tayyip Erdogan’s latest outburst could threaten his ambition to be the Middle East mediator, and as he outlined in his presentation at Davos, Turkey has hosted five rounds of talks in the Israel-Syria question as a prelude to direct talks. There could be other fallout too. Turkey’s efforts to block the Armenian genocide resolution in Congress are contingent on the support of the Jewish lobby, and these efforts could come unstuck if President Obama keeps his pre-election pledge to recognize
the events of 1915 as genocide.
There could be another form of backlash. If Israel compares its struggle with Hamas to Turkey’s efforts to combat the PKK, and if the Jewish lobby in the USA seconds this motion, Turkey’s efforts to maintain its territorial integrity could be undermined.
There is also the shadow side of the humanitarian concern Tayyip Erdogan emphasized in his presentation. When the Turkish prime minister visited Khartoum in 2006, he declared that no genocide had been committed in Darfur, and Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir has twice been cordially received in Ankara. This raises the question of the sincerity of Mr Erdogan’s commitment and whether this is colored by his preoccupation with Islam.
Robert Ellis is a regular commentator on Turkish affairs in the Danish press and was also a frequent contributor to Turkish Daily News.
PM Erdogan claims he acted to uphold the honor of Turkey. It seems to me that behavior similar to a petulant child reflects poorly on Turkey. In his defense, the Turkish press attributes to the PM the statement that Turkey has never targeted a specific religion or people or never will. This suggests he must be either ignorant of modern Turkish history or extremely disingenuous. I suspect the latter.
Wow, as I can see the anti-AKP elements are starting to show their deeply rooted anti-Turkish as well as anti-Muslim bias. Talk about moving forwards to the real “clash of civilizations” here.
I have a history of critiquing Erdogan. I also have a history of agreeing with Robert Ellis on various other issues. But this “opinion” piece is really telling a lot of things.
Congratulations, Mr. Ellis, as well as the Jewish organizations of America who only look out for Israeli interests and don’t consider for a MOMENT the humanitarian dimensions of this issue, for making Erdogan stand even STRONGER with commentary like this.
You are the GIFT that keeps on giving political FREEBIES to Erdogan. Erdogan’s image of being the “righteous” leader of the downtrodden and dispossessed has thus been set in stone.
Congrats.
haah. I though Glutton Perez raised his tone too high and talked pointing finger at Erdogan. He was very biased and overly emotional. Well, wait he is a Jew, so no need or no hope of being civil.
Both comments by Selin and dhimmi contain anti-Jewish slurs. Selin attributes unusual powers to the “Jewish organizations of America” and dhimmi here opines that a Jew, by being a Jew, cannot be civil.
I urge the moderator to leave these comments as are. Nothing can be more damaging to the image of Turkish thoughtfulness and decency they want to project than these incontinent comments. Never in the horizon a hint of a doubt, unaware that by repeating these defamatory memes they are exhibiting and reinforcing the stereotype of the Turk.
It was Spinoza who said:
“In this the Turks have achieved the greatest measure of success. They hold even discussion of religion to be sinful, and with their mass of dogma they gain such a thorough hold on the individual’s judgment that they leave no room in the mind for the exercise of reason, or even the capacity to doubt.”
Substitute “Turkishness” for “religion” (or not, as you please) and you get the tone and substance of these two just right, 400 years after the original comment was made.
________
BtW, concerning the slur upon “Jewish organizations of America”:
Not too long ago, Turks were all too willing to seek to use Jewish influence in the Congress to block this acknowledgement of the historical atrocity that was the Armenian genocide. And the Jewish organizations that helped them pretended, for a while, that they couldn’t smell the stench of this humongous hypocrisy. I don’t suppose this failure of “Jewish organizations of America” to mire themselves in this kind of denial has anything at all to do with the open animus against (not Israel, mind you) but JOOS!
http://contentious-centrist.blogspot.com/2007/08/denying-armenian-genocide-via-normblog.html
World peace and justice become this Turkey ensure
no war…
NE MUTLU TÜRK’ÜM DIYENE
I live in Ankara now and have been coming and going for the last 15 years. I have never seen an “wave of anti-Semitism” in the country. In fact, it is well known that Turkey is Israel’s greatest ally in the region. The truth is that Israel and Olmert stabbed Erdogan in the back before the last war pretending that they were a reliable partner for peace. Israel has NEVER been a reliable partner for peace; slaughtering civilians, expanding settlements, occupying Palestinian land while employing strangling embargoes by land sea and air.
We are witnessing the death throws of capitalism, demonocracy and Israel. Your article is bias, ill informed and Islamiphobic. I am not an Erdogan fan myself, but his only crime is standing up for justice and the rights of the 1300 Palestinians that Israel murdered and the justice of the oppressed and occupied. That is much more than the rest of the world’s leaders have been willing to do. That is the leadership that is required in today’s world. KEEP IT UP MR. ERDOGAN!!
@muslim(dhimmi bashing mode)
Selin, to set your mind at rest I assure you I am neither anti-Turk nor anti-Muslim. What I show is
1. that Erdogan’s irascible temperament is a handicap.
2. that his humanitarian concern is selective and does not, for
example, include the Sudan atrocities.
With regards,
Labeling everyone who criticizes Israel as anti-Semitic, leaves Israel (unfairly) above all. Should we look the other way when Israel bombs thousands of people homeless, just to avoid to be blamed a friend of Hamas? OR; should we nod our head to unjust American support of everything Israel does?
Why should anyone but Israel pay to build back Gaza? Israel should be forced to repair those homes and feed those people.
Suheyla,
“Labeling everyone who criticizes Israel as anti-Semitic, leaves Israel (unfairly) above all.”
You are absolutely right. If you want to criticize Israel’s policies you can do so, quite reasonably. When you do that, I can try to rebut your arguments or facts with superior arguments and better recorded facts. However, antisemitic tropes CANNOT pass for legitimate criticism of Israel.
The moment Selin said this:
“Congratulations, Mr. Ellis, as well as the Jewish organizations of America who only look out for Israeli interests and don’t consider for a MOMENT the humanitarian dimensions of this issue, for making Erdogan stand even STRONGER with commentary like this.”
his argument became antisemitic and therefore illegitimate. Why? Because it is no longer aimed at Israel’s POLICIES, but at Jews, elsewhere, who support Israel but are not in any way responsible for Israel’s actions. In other words, for Selin they are suspect and relevant to his argument by virtue of being Jewish. THAT is antisemitism. In case you wondered.
Surely this little distinction is not so difficult to understand, is it?
Because of a flood of anti-semitic and ad hominum comments as well as other repeated and deliberate violations of the comments policy, this comments thread has been closed and several commenters banned.
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