Turkey’s moment in the sun

S Nihal Singh

WHATEVER the future holds for the European Union (EU), the refugees flooding European shores have one winner, Turkey. And even as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is relishing his moment of triumph, the EU is beseeching him to come to its aid in stemming the endless flow of Syrian (and other) refugees using Turkey as a launching pad to make it to the nearby Greek islands and hence into the sought-after EU.

In a sense, the ultimate outcome of the refugee crisis will determine German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s future for taking in 1.1 million refugees last year and the determination of other EU members to erect barriers to negate the Schengen visa-free credo. With the exception of Germany and Sweden and Austria up to a point, most member states have refused to share the burden, leaving the group’s solidarity in tatters.

Ms Merkel has been twice to Turkey to plead with President Erdogan to help her and the EU out of the dilemma facing them with a sweetener of more than $3 billion. And Ankara has been using the opportunity to extract concessions such as visa-free travel in the EU for Turks and the speeding up of the process of Turkey’s accession to the EU. According to the latest agreement hammered out, all non-Syrian refugees will be returned to Turkey on the condition that the EU will take one refugee living in a Turkish camp for each returned, in addition to giving a further bounty.

After more than a decade as Prime Minister, Mr Erdogan had himself elected President with a view to converting the system into an executive presidency, but his party, the AKP, lost its majority in the next elections. In a new election held subsequently, with the AKP launching an offensive against its Kurdish population and raising the decibel level of nationalist rhetoric, Mr Erdogan’s party regained its majority.

President Erdogan, meanwhile, has been clearing the decks. He seems to be modelling himself on Kemal Atatuk, who had built a modern secular Turkey on the ruins of the Ottoman empire. But he gave a religious twist to the AKP with the support of the Fetullah Gulen movement named after a cleric living in self-exile in the US. It was well known that the Gulens had penetrated the administration and the judiciary in Turkey.

President Erdogan and Gulen fell out in 2013 after the movement had helped out senior ministers on corruption charges. A purge of Gulenists followed. Indeed, there have been many twists and turns in Mr Erdogan’s progress towards assuming the airs of a new Ataturk. At one time, he was a peacemaker with the Kurdish party, the PKK, giving them linguistic concessions and his administration parleying with their leader Abdullah Ocalan in prison on a Turkish island. Such approaches were abandoned, perhaps for electoral reasons, and a tentative ceasefire was abrogated. Turkish Kurds represent up to 15 per cent of the population and their fellow brothers, the Syrian Kurds, the YPD, are the main ground fighting force of Americans in Syria.

There is little doubt that President Erdogan sees himself as a fitting heir to Ataturk. The twist lies in converting a secular model into a religious one (his wife covers her head) in keeping with his support base in Anatolia, men who prospered in the days of the economic boom and came to constitute the new middle class moving into urban centres. Mr Erdogan has moved into a new 1,100-room palace on the outskirts of Ankara built on the Ottoman model. A palace of the last Ottoman ruler in Istanbul has been taken over by the President as his residence there.

Although constitutionally the Turkish system remains parliamentary, Mr Erdogan is in effect the executive president and the man he appointed Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, follows his orders to the minutest detail. He had retired his previous colleague, Mr Abdullah Gul, his predecessor in office, apparently because he was too moderate for his taste.

By all accounts, President Erdogan is consolidating his position by curbing the media. His latest coup has been against the largest selling paper Zaman, linked to the Gulen movement, and a number of journalists are in prison or facing charges. It was at the same time Mr Erdogan who succeeded in getting rid of the army’s traditional control over the political process in the name of Ataturk, although a show trial of a number of military officials yielded little.

In his quest for greater control, President Erdogan is still seeking a constitutional amendment which will give him the formal powers he is already enjoying. His bold step of taking over Zaman newspaper was probably determined by the EU’s present supplicant attitude on the refugee issue. The recent agreement at the EU-Turkish summit has still to be firmed up and doubts have been raised over its validity in complying with international treaties.

Although few leaders are voicing their opposition to Turkey eventually joining the EU at this delicate point in the relationship, many would object to the taking in a country of about 80 million of mostly Muslims in the group. And indeed the whole concept of a liberal democratic basis of member states would be called into question by Mr Erdogan’s intolerance of dissent.

Outside of problems posed by Turkey, the EU itself is undergoing a serious crisis in the attitude of some member states, in particular Hungary and now Poland, whose leaders see themselves as crusaders and opponents of at least some democratic norms. And the EU will take long to get over the shame in refusing to share with Germany and Sweden the burden of taking in Syrian refugees. With the setting up of border fences, many states are jeopardising the great success of visa-free travel across much of Europe.

President Erdogan believes that his extravagant dreams are about to be fulfilled. What the future holds remains to be determined but history teaches us that events have a way of upsetting the best-laid plans.