Mohamed Kaouche/Demotix. All rights reserved.Dear Mr.
President,
In these difficult
and dangerous days for Turkey, the role of head of state is the most difficult
and loneliest of all. Surrounded by
people with all manner of advice to offer, in the end you have to make or
endorse the key decisions, and you can probably do without another voice – let
along a foreign one – muddying the waters.
Nevertheless I
would like you to hear mine. As a
British citizen with a Turkish wife I have followed your career with interest
but also, in the last few years, with increasing concern. As mayor of Istanbul you made much-needed changes
to a shamefully neglected great city, and its modern transportation system and
clean air are now a fitting testament to your efforts as mayor; Turkey’s
continuing economic dynamism under your prime ministership is something of
which you can be justly proud.
In some areas, as
is only natural, you have been less successful.
Cultural and education policy is one, where your religious commitments
seem to have prevailed over the more pragmatic considerations you might have
brought to bear on them, and where large sums of public money have been spent
on mosque building and the promotion of Imam Hatip Schools while secular
schools and excellent state theatres are run into the ground. The result has been cultural division rather
than diversity or plurality, brought to the surface by the Gezi Park protests
in June 2013. Still, those who feel they
are getting a raw deal from your cultural policy are resourceful and they will continue
to find a way around the barriers you would put in their place.
However, it is in
foreign policy that you have failed most clearly, and this is now having an
impact on your approach to domestic security.
The result is that Turkey, the country that you love and which I have
grown to love, stands on the brink of disaster.
If that disaster occurs it will not be all your fault by any means – the
external pressures alone have been immense – but as the most powerful man in
the country you are in the best position to save it, as was your great enemy Bashar
al Assad in Syria. Is the lesson of his
misrule playing no part in your current thinking?
In order to avert
disaster you will need to display all of your renowned energy but above all to
discover in yourself the qualities of statesmanship that the current situation
demands. Rumour has it that your illness is slowing you down and it does appear
that way, but there is nothing I can do about that. As to the question of statesmanship, I can
only try.
***
The problems of
modern political leadership are as old as politics itself and so I could just
tell you to read Plato, Cicero, Machiavelli, Burke and Weber, but there is
hardly the time. The latter’s pessimism
would not be to your taste anyway; after all, you are a solutions man, and he
once said that the difference between scientific and political problems was
that political problems have no solution.
He did though make
an important distinction you would do well to heed between two attitudes the
political leader can take: he spoke of an ethic of conviction and an ethic of
responsibility. If you follow the former
you will decide what to do on the basis of what you believe and go ahead
regardless; if you follow the latter you will still believe things with passion
but, realising that others have their own passions that are different from
yours but just as genuine, you will think about the possible consequences of
your actions before you act. You need an
ethic of responsibility now more than ever, and to stop acting on the basis of
an ethic of conviction.
***
For however much
you believe in the ideals of the Muslim Brotherhood, or in the Sunni version of
Islam, however much you dislike alcohol, not every Turkish citizen is Sunni or
even religious, and not every Turkish citizen dislikes alcohol. And not all
Turkish citizens are ethnically Turkish.
You know this of course and in the past you have made better efforts
than the Kemalists ever did to improve Turkish-Kurdish relations. But now you are in danger of forgetting what Edmund
Burke said about political representation: that once a politician is elected to
parliament, his duty is to serve all his constituents equally, those who voted for
him and those who did not. He believed
that in this way the politician, and especially the political leader, would be
free from the often negative influence of particular groups of people, especially
that of his own supporters, and so best be able to make independent and wise judgments
about the good of the country as a whole.
You will doubtless
reply that that is what you are doing at present, that you would like to unite
the country against a small but powerful group of terrorists. Sadly, that is not the way it comes across
to me or to many others. Instead, your public statements seem designed to
divide rather than to unite, and you seem to be speaking not to the nation as a
whole, but to your most enthusiastic supporters. The language of ‘brotherhood’ is particularly
unfortunate in this respect, because it implies a degree of intimacy where
there is none and where it would be better that none were required: do I have
to be your ‘brother’ to be your fellow citizen and obey the same laws?
What is worse, in
response to the result of an election that you hoped that one particular party
would win – itself a curious attitude for a head of state with limited
executive powers – you have made every effort to obstruct the formation of a
coalition government. Indeed, you have
openly expressed the view that an overwhelming parliamentary majority for one
party, and for the ideas of the people who vote for it and only for those
ideas, would be best for the country.
And you have done this in the face of a possible alternative scenario,
one that might have been a model for a new politics in Turkey, one of
compromise and give and take rather than macho posturing. The party that appeared best to present
something of that alternative was of course the HDP, nominally a pro-Kurdish
party, but attracting support from a rather varied electorate.
***
And now, in the
face of a renewed campaign of violence by the PKK, instead of focusing all your
efforts on ways of defeating and isolating the PKK, you seek to make a
connection between this terrorist organization and a political party that
gained 13% of the vote in a free election.
The result, the direct consequence, of your statements, has been plain
to see: all over the country on the night of September 7, the offices of the
HDP, a legitimate political party committed to peace and social justice, which
precisely because it explicitly rejected the PKK gained 6.5 million votes, were
attacked by groups of nationalist hooligans, while the police, whose duty in
any civilized society is to protect all citizens and all their property, stood
by and allowed it to happen.
Kurdish people who
have never hurt anyone in their lives but want the same things as any other
Turkish citizen, indeed whose sons and brothers are serving in the Turkish
army, have been harassed, beaten up and in some cases killed. The result is a dangerous polarization, an
increase of tensions, and the real possibility that people in Kurdish areas,
but not just there, will seek to protect themselves with weapons because the
police will not do so. Why you spend so
much time talking about banning alcohol when the average Turk consumes 1.5
litres of it per year is a mystery to me.
Why not talk about guns and their ready availability in shops all over the
country? Are guns less dangerous than
alcohol?
You could have
said something about these attacks, encouraged your fellow citizens at this
difficult time to come together and not hate one another, but you didn’t. At the time of the Suruc massacre, too, you
could have cut short your visit to Cyprus and expressed sympathy for the
victims, people who may have been politically naïve and may indeed have hated
you, but who were your fellow citizens and who had gathered together to help
people less fortunate than themselves.
You could have declared a day of national mourning for them, for young lives
cut short. You would have impressed
everyone in Turkey and abroad with your magnanimity and decency. But you didn’t, even though you had declared
three days of national mourning earlier in the year for the King of Saudi
Arabia, whose hardline Islamic regime includes beheading as part of its
criminal justice system.
***
And now we have
the spectacle of a city under curfew, cut off from the rest of the world, with
the government having relinquished civilian control over the security forces
and left them to act in whatever way they see fit, foreign journalists deported
merely for seeking to report as objectively as they can, and a seventeen year
old boy sentenced to 11 months in prison for ‘insulting the President’. You may not be aware of this – your previous
statements about the way other countries conduct themselves suggest that you
are not – but what you call insults, as well as gross caricature, are part and
parcel of flourishing democracies around the world, and political leaders like
David Cameron or Barack Obama see them as a relatively minor occupational
hazard, but in no way a threat to their authority. Why they do so and why you cannot one can
only speculate.
It might be
because they have thicker skins, but it might be because they have learned
something that Machiavelli taught when he praised those politicians of old who
were able to place the preservation of the republic above the salvation of
their souls. That, precisely, is your
task now. If you fail, you will have the
blood of more than a few terrorists on your hands. Think hard, and act wisely, before it is too
late.
Charles Turner
