Neocon think-thank warns U.S. administration on a possible 'Islamic
Revolution' in Turkey
by the islamic AKP govt of Erdogan; like that in Iran in '79...
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWZlOGJmZDQ2NGYwMmIwZWYxYTYxZTAwZTIxYzI3ZGY=&w=MA==
"
Turkey's Turning Point - Could there be an Islamic Revolution in Turkey?
By Michael Rubin, April 14, 2008, 6:00 a.m.
Few U.S. policymakers have heard of Fethullah Gülen, perhaps
Turkey's most prominent theologian and political thinker.
Self-exiled for more than a decade, Gülen lives a reclusive life
outside Philadelphia, Pa. Within months, however, he may be as
much a household a name in the United States as is Ayatollah
Khomeini, a man who was as obscure to most Americans up until
his triumphant return to Iran almost 30 years ago.
Many academics and journalist embrace Gülen and applaud his
stated vision welding Islam with tolerance and a pro-European
outlook. Sup****ters describe him as progressive. In 2003, the
University of Texas honored him as a "peaceful hero," alongside
Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama. Last
October, the British House of Lords and several British
diplomats celebrated Gülen at a high-profile London conference.
Later this year, Georgetown University scholar John Esposito
will host a conference dedicated to the movement. As in 2001,
Esposito will cosponsor with the Rumi Forum, an organization
Gülen serves AS honorary president.
The Gülen movement controls charities, real estate, companies,
and more than a thousand schools internationally. According to
some estimates, the Gülen Movement controls several billion
dollars. The movement claims its own universities, unions,
lobbies, student groups, radio and television stations, and the
Zaman newspaper. Turkish officials concede that Gülen's
followers in Turkey number more than a million; Gülen's backers
claim that number is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, Gülen
members dominate the Turkish police and divisions within the
interior ministry. Under the steward****p of Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan, one of Gülen's most prominent sympathizers, tens
of thousands of other Gülen sup****ters have entered the Turkish
bureaucracy.
While Gülen sup****ters jealously guard his image in the West, he
remains a controversial figure in Turkey. According to
***huriyet, a left-of-center establishment daily - Turkey's New
York Times in 1973, the Izmir State Security Court convicted
Gülen of "attempting to destroy the state system and to
establish a state system based on religion;" he received a
pardon, though, and so never served time in prison. In 1986, the
Turkish military - the constitutional guardians of the state's
secularism - purged a Gülen cell from the military academy; the
Turkish military has subsequently acted against a number of
other alleged Gülen cells who they say infiltrated military
ranks.
In 1998, according to Turkish court transcripts cited in the
Turkish Daily News, Gülen urged followers in the judiciary and
state bureaucracy to "work patiently to take control of the
state." The following year, the independent Turkish television
station ATV broadcast a secretly taped Gülen telling sup****ters,
"If they . . . come out early, the world will squash their
heads. They will make Muslims relive events in Algeria," a
reference to the Islamic Salvation Front's overwhelming 1991
election victory in the North African state. After party leaders
spoke of voiding the constitution and implementing Islamic law,
the Algerian military staged a coup leading to a civil conflict
that killed tens of thousands.
Because of his statements and veiled threats, the judiciary in
1998 charged Gülen with trying to "undermine the secular system"
while "camouflag[ing] his methods with a democratic and moderate
image." Convicted in absentia, but free to run his organized
from his U.S. exile, Gülen continues a rather inconsistent
approach to tolerance and secularism. He often equates the
separation of religion and state with atheism, an assertion many
of Turkey's most secular officials find offensive: Believing
that religion is best kept to the individual rather than state
sphere does not equate with any lack of belief in God. In 2004,
Gülen equated atheism with terrorism and said both atheists and
murderers would spend eternity in Hell.
Gülen has received a legal break, however. In 2002, Erdoğan's
Justice and Development party (Adalet ve Kakınma Partisi, AKP)
won a plurality in parliamentary elections and, because of a
fluke in Turkish election law, was able to amplify one-third of
the popular vote into a two-thirds parliamentary majority.
Erdoğan used this advantage to enact reforms which had the net
affect of stacking not only the civil service, but also banking
boards and the judiciary with his political sup****ters and
religious fundamentalists. Erdoğan's judges wasted no time. They
placed liens against political opponents' property, seized
independent newspapers and television station including, not by
coincidence ATV, and assigned sympathetic judges to hear appeals
against earlier decisions levied against Islamists. On May 5,
2006, the Ankara Criminal Court overturned the verdict against
Gülen. While a public prosecutor - a secularist hold-out -
appealed the court's action, the process is now nearing
conclusion. Gülen's sup****ters are ecstatic. His slate wiped
clean, Gülen has indicated he may soon return to Turkey.
If he does, Istanbul 2008 may very well look like Tehran 1979.
Just as Gülen's sup****ters affirm his altruistic intentions and
see no inconsistency between a secretive, cell-based movement
and transparent governance, too many Western journalists also
give Gülen a free pass.
If this sounds familiar, it should: Three decades ago, the same
phenomenon marked coverage of Iran. "I don't want to be the
leader of the Islamic Republic; I don't want to have the
government or power in my hands," Khomeini told a credulous
Austrian television re****ter during the ayatollah's brief
sojourn in Paris. In November 1978, Steven Erlanger, the future
New York Times foreign correspondent, penned a New Republic
essay arguing that Khomeini's vision for Iran was essentially a
"Platonic Republic with a grand ayatollah as a
philosopher-king," and predicting the triumph of an independent
liberal left worried more about labor conditions in Iran's oil
fields than pursuing any theological tendency
In Tehran then as in Ankara now, U.S. ambassadors preferred
garden parties with the political elite and maintained contacts
with only a narrow segment of the population. They were blind.
As the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency remained
clueless or belittled concerns about Khomeini's intentions,
millions of Iranians turned out to greet their Imam at Tehran's
international air****t. Turks now say that similar crowds might
greet Gülen when his plane touches down in Istanbul.
Gülen is careful. He will not order the dissolution of the
Turkish Republic. But, ensconced in his Istanbul mansion, he
could simply begin to issue fatwas prying Turkey farther from
the secularism to which Erdoğan pays lip service. As Khomeini
consciously drew parallels between himself and Twelver ****ism's
Hidden Imam, Gülen will remain quiet as his sup****ters paint his
return as evidence that the caliphate formally dissolved by
Atatürk in 1924 has been restored.
The secular order and constitutionalism in Turkey have never
been so shaky. The government now controls most television and
radio stations. Erdoğan has gained the dubious distinction of
launching more lawsuits against journalists and commentators
than any previous Turkish prime minister.
As Erdoğan discourages dissent, his and Gülen's sup****ters among
prominent Turkish columnists and commentators equate Islamism
with democracy, and secularism with fascism, a line too many
Western diplomats eager to demonstrate tolerance with an embrace
of "moderate Islam" accept. Erdoğan himself has argued that it
was secularism which led to Hitler; that Islamism would never
produce such a result.
Last month, after one of the few independent judicial
authorities filed a lawsuit against Erdoğan and the AKP for
violating constitutional provisions separating religion from
politics, the prime minister responded with a midnight round up
of leading academics and journalists who had criticized him.
Even Erdoğan's sup****ters were shocked to wake up on March 21 to
learn that İlhan Selçuk, the bed-ridden octogenarian
editor-in-chief of ***huriyet described by Turks as their Walter
Cronkite had been arrested in a predawn raid on charges of
plotting to launch a military coup; the police have yet to
provide any evidence. Nor is Selçuk the only victim in the most
recent intimidation campaign. A Hürriyet columnist, Ahmet Hakan,
has received threatening phone calls from lawyer Kemaletin
Gülen, a relative of Fethullah.
When Islamists pursue campaigns of hatred, Western officials not
only pretend nothing is amiss but also, as in the case of
Palestinian leaders, often increase their sup****t. This week
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will address the judicial
case against Erdoğan and the AKP. Members of her staff suggest
she will lend subtle sup****t to the prime minister. Indeed, it
may be tempting to condemn the court action as a political
stunt: The prosecutor's legal brief is shoddily written and
poorly argued. Despite its faults, however, the underlying legal
issues are real.
Rice should be silent. Any interference will backfire: Turks,
already upset that U.S. ambassador Ross Wilson seldom meets with
opposition leaders, will interpret any criticism of the case as
White House sup****t for the AKP. Secularists will ask why
Turkey's liberal opposition should not have the right to all
legal remedies. They already ask why the West applauds legal
action taken against Austrian populist Jörg Haider and French
demagogue Jean Marie Le Pen, but the same U.S. and European
officials appear to bless Erdoğan's legal exceptionalism. By
undermining judicial recourse, Rice may accelerate violence and
lead sup****t to those who argue - wrongly - that the
government's disdain for the law and constitution should be met
with the same. On the off-chance, however, that Rice accepts
that the court case should run its course, Turkey's religious
conservatives will accuse her of masterminding the approach.
Over the past seven years, the Bush administration has made many
mistakes. Bush was correct to recognize the im****tance of
democratization; bungled implementation has turned a noble ideal
into a dirty word. By equating democracy only with elections,
the State Department and National Security Council fumbled U.S.
interests in Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon. One man, one vote, once;
parties that enforce discipline at the point of a gun; and
politicians who seek to subvert the rule of law to an imam's
conception of God do little for U.S. national security. Never
again should the United States abandon its ideological
compatriots for the ephemeral promises of parties that use
religion to subvert democracy and seek mob rather than
constitutional rule.
Turkey is nearing the cliff. Please, Secretary Rice, do not push it over
the edge.
- Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,
is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
"
See also:
"Turkish Turn Back? - Tolerance, slipping"
http://www.nationalreview.com/rubin/rubin200510190816.asp
"Fethullah Gülen'i Humeyni'ye benzeten ABD'li Ortadoğu ve İran uzmanından
şeriat uyarısı"
http://www.haber3.com/haber.php?haber_id=361685&comments=all
(tr)
..
|
