Taking Turkey's Military to the Political Brink
AUSTIN BAY BLOG
Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan has decided to challenge Kemal Ataturk's system. Turkey's parliament just voted to elect Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as president. Erdogan and Gul were both members of the moderately-Islamist Welfare Party (which was banned in the late 1990s).
Via Bloomberg:
"Turkey's military, which has ousted four governments since 1960, has clashed with Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the separation of mosque and state. The generals blocked Gul's first run for president in April, forcing an early general election, when they warned that he might undermine the secular order established in Turkey eight decades ago after the Ottoman Empire collapsed.
`People are worried that Erdogan's government is getting control of all levers of power," Ilter Turkmen, who served as foreign minister after a military coup in 1980, said in an interview. "I am worried that there will now be continuous tension between the army and the government, and the military could make Gul's life miserable…"
And another key graf:
"The head of the army, General Yasar Buyukanit, repeated the military's warning to the government on secularism in a statement yesterday to mark Victory Day on Aug. 30. The military is determined to stop "sneaky plans aimed at removing the republic's achievements," Buyukanit said.
Buyukanit leads the second-largest standing army in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after the U.S. military. The army says secularism must be preserved in order to keep Turkey on its European path and away from the influence of Islamic states in the neighboring Middle East."
The Turkish military is tasked with protecting secular democracy –that's its constitutional role. Republican Turkey's founding father, Kemal Ataturk, designed it that way.
The Bloomberg article adds this about the "tightrope" Gul will have to walk:
"The military will expect Gul, who has led Turkey's membership talks with the European Union as foreign minister, to honor pledges made over the past two weeks to protect Turkey's secular ideology and remain above party politics. Those promises won him support from Turkey's biggest business groups and unions."
Toppling the democratically elected government would be a terrible mistake. Likewise, damaging Turkey's economy and democratic institutions on behalf of a narrow "religious-ideological agenda" would be an even larger mistake. Turkey must navigate this secular-religious waltz — if it succeeds it will continue to be an example for other predominantly Muslim nations.
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