TURKEY IN CRISIS: ECHOES OF TEHERAN?
by Srdja Trifkovic
Turkey is in the midst of a mounting financial and political crisis, the worst since the military coup of 1980. In the third week of February overnight interest rates soared to 20 percent, or 7,000 percent per annum. The stock market tumbled, losing 18 percent of its value on February 21 alone. The government in Ankara was forced to abandon exchange rate controls and float its currency, the lira, which lost a third of its value in a matter of days. Galloping inflation and collapsing banks have reportedly prompted the International Monetary Fund to extend billions of dollars in loans.
The latest crisis was triggered off by a very public quarrel between Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit--the septuagenarian political veteran who presided over the invasion of Cyprus in 1974--and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer. The dispute, ostensibly over the pace and scope of the government’s anti-corruption drive, would not have had such consequences were it not for the structural weaknesses of Turkey’s economic and political system. The reaction of the markets, barely recovered from a less dramatic slide last November, reflected widespread concern over the ability of Ecevit’s government to tackle those weaknesses. Turkish officials now estimate that the country will need over $25 billion in foreign loans to overcome the immediate effects of the current crisis.
Before the United States is dragged into another bailout of Mexican proportions it is necessary to take a hard look at the fundamentals. Eight months ago we warned that Turkey’s latent tension between modernization dictated from above and religiously expressed resistance from below is structurally similar to the strain that proved fatal to the Shah in 1979 (“Is Turkey the Next Iran?” News & Views, May 4, 2000). Today we can only add that, just as enormous oil revenues could not resolve the problem in Iran, there is no reason to believe that the proposed massive injections of foreign liquidity will do the trick in Turkey. The Kemalist dream of strict secularism has never penetrated beyond the military and a relatively narrow stratum of urban elite centered in Istanbul. The rise of Islam in the mainstream political landscape became fully apparent in June 1997, when the Turkish army intervened to force the resignation of Necmettin Erbakan, the democratically elected prime minister and leader of the Islamic Refah party.
The fact that political Islam had found such fertile ground in Turkey came as a shock to many, revealing the ultimate dependence of the political system on the army. The CIA’s 1997 “State Failure Task Force” report identified Turkey as a nation in danger of collapse. The resulting erosion of the ruling stratum’s self-confidence has led to increased oppression. Journalists now risk fines, imprisonment, bans, or violent attacks if they write about “the role of Islam in politics and society” or “the proper role of the military in government and society” (Human Rights Watch, 1999). Turkey is a “guided democracy” at best, with no institution, judicial or civil, truly independent of the State, and with the military as the final guarantor of its pro-Western, secular orientation.
The official line from Ankara in the wake of this latest crisis--that the underlying strength of the Turkish economy and its political institutions remain unaffected--is reflected in its friends’ assurances that a bit of shock therapy may be just what the country needs to become more efficient. Writing in The Wall Street Journal (“Turkey’s Crisis Has a Silver Lining,” March 2) Norman Stone thus asserted that “there’s a ‘crisis’ perhaps, but no reason to panic.”
Other analysts are not so sure. Darko Tanaskovic, who teaches Turkish studies at the University of Belgrade and who was until recently Yugoslavia’s ambassador in Ankara, says that even many Turks would question Stone’s assertions. He warns that the lack of cultural rootedness of Turkey’s political elites remains as serious a problem today as it was in Ataturk’s times, and says that in many minds the question about the dormant Islamic volcano is not if, but when. The problem, according to Dr. Tanaskovic, is compounded by the Turkish elite’s own divisions. In the business community and the academe one encounters the proponents of a neo-Ottoman model that would supposedly better fit the post-national, globalist paradigm. On the other hand, the old-fashioned nationalists--notably the officer class--dislike any notion of Turkey’s integration into the “international community” as inherently suspect. Tanaskovic concludes that Turkey’s economic performance over the past decade, which is even more impressive if we take into account the unrecorded “gray economy,” has not contributed to the emergence of a self-perpetuating political consensus.
A senior analyst with the U.S. Senate agrees with this assessment and notes that the present turmoil is likely to increase pressure from the United States on the European Union to accept Turkey as a member, on the simplistic assumption that integration into “Europe” is the best antidote to Islam. In December 1999, Turkey was finally recognized as an E.U. candidate, but the opening of formal negotiations was conditional on satisfaction of human rights criteria. The full membership is most unlikely to be granted, however, although few Germans will openly admit that this refusal is driven less by Turkey’s violations of democracy and its economic volatility than by the West Europeans’ fear of the resulting migratory deluge.
What happens to Turkey is important not only because it is a regional power of some significance. Its population will exceed that of Russia thirty years from now if today’s demographic trends continue, and its foreign trade turnover--at almost $100 billion a year--is almost at Russia’s level. Turkey’s cultural and political influence is on the rise in its old holdings in the Balkans, as well as throughout the former Soviet Central Asia. Its proximity to the Caspian oil fields has fortified its position as a key U.S. ally in the area of eastern Mediterranean and a major recipient of American weapons and technology, whose air base at Incirlik is regularly used by the U.S. Air Force to bomb Iraq.
The Bush administration will make a serious mistake if it continues putting all of its Levantine eggs into one Turkish basket, as it may yet discover that “democratization” of Turkey may mean its irreversible Islamization. The latest crisis should sound alarm bells in Washington that America needs alternative scenarios to cover such eventuality.
The first step will be to end the perennial war with Iraq. It is absurd to insist on maintaining a no-fly-zone in northern Iraq, ostensibly in order to protect the Kurdish population from Saddam, while on the other side of the border Turkey uses U.S.-made jets and helicopters to target the same Kurdish population. Finding a way out of the Iraqi imbroglio would also contribute to an improvement of America’s relations with the Arab world in general, at a time when the Middle East is more volatile than at any time since 1973. But the key to this approach calls for a long-term rapprochement with Russia, instead of an unnecessary and costly new cold war. This would provide an alternative access route to the Caspian oil fields if, one day in the not too distant future, Turkey becomes an Islamic Republic. It may not happen, but if it does Washington must not be caught napping.
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