In Silicon Valley, where I live, the word “disruption” has an overwhelmingly positive valence: Thousands of smart, young people arrive here every year hoping to disrupt established ways of doing business — and become very rich in the process.
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The Dangers of Disruption - The New York Times - 0 views
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disruption nativism protectionism illiberal democracy liberalism politics culture crisis
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For almost everyone else, however, disruption is a bad thing. By nature, human beings prize stability and order. We learn to be adults by accumulating predictable habits, and we bond by memorializing our ancestors and traditions.
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So it should not be surprising that in today’s globalized world, many people are upset that vast technological and social forces constantly disrupt established social practices, even if they are better off materially.
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globalization has produced enormous benefits. From 1970 to the 2008 financial crisis, global output quadrupled, and the benefits did not flow exclusively to the rich. According to the economist Steven Radelet, the number of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries fell from 42 percent in 1993 to 17 percent in 2011, while the percentage of children born in developing countries who died before their fifth birthday declined from 22 percent in 1960 to less than 5 percent by 2016.
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statistics like these do not reflect the lived experience of many people. The shift of manufacturing from the West to low labor-cost regions has meant that Asia’s rising middle classes have grown at the expense of rich countries’ working-class communities
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from a cultural standpoint, the huge movement of ideas, people and goods across national borders has disrupted traditional communities and ways of doing business. For some this has presented tremendous opportunity, but for others it is a threat.
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This disruption has been closely associated with the growth of American power and the liberal world order that the United States has shaped since the end of World War II. Understandably, there has been blowback, both against the United States and within the nation.
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Liberalism is based on a rule of law that maintains a level playing field for all citizens, particularly the right to private property
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The democratic part, political choice, is the enforcer of communal choices and accountable to the citizenry as a whole
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Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed revolts around the world of the democratic part of this equation against the liberal one
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Vladimir Putin, perhaps the world’s chief practitioner of illiberal democracy. Mr. Putin has become very popular in Russia, particularly since his annexation of Crimea in 2014. He does not feel bound by law: Mr. Putin and his cronies use political power to enrich themselves and business wealth to guarantee their hold on power.
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The citizens of India and Japan have elected nationalist leaders who many say they believe champion a more closed form of identity than their predecessors
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Mr. Trump’s ascent poses a unique challenge to the American system because he fits comfortably into the trend toward illiberal democracy.
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Like Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump seemsto want to use a democratic mandate to undermine the checks and balances that characterize a genuine liberal democracy. He will be an oligarch in the Russian mold: a rich man who used his wealth to gain political power and who would use political power to enrich himself once in office
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Mr. Orbán, Mr. Putin and Mr. Erdogan all came to power in countries with an electorate polarized between a more liberal, cosmopolitan urban elite — whether in Budapest, Moscow or Istanbul — and a less-educated rural voter base. This social division is similar to the one that drove the Brexit vote in Britain and Donald Trump’s rise in the United States..
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How far will this trend toward illiberal democracy go? Are we headed for a period like that of the early 20th century, in which global politics sank into conflict over closed and aggressive nationalism?
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The outcome will depend on several critical factors, particularly the way global elites respond to the backlash they have engendered.
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In America and Europe, elites made huge policy blunders in recent years that hurt ordinary people more than themselves.
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Deregulation of financial markets laid the groundwork for the subprime crisis in the United States, while a badly designed euro contributed to the debt crisis in Greece, and the Schengen system of open borders made it difficult to control the flood of refugees in Europe. Elites must acknowledge their roles in creating these situations.
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Now it’s up to the elites to fix damaged institutions and to better buffer those segments of their own societies that have not benefited from globalization to the same extent.
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Above all, it is important to keep in mind that reversing the existing liberal world order would likely make things worse for everyone, including those left behind by globalization. The fundamental driver of job loss in the developed world, after all, is not immigration or trade, but technological change.
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We need better systems for buffering people against disruption, even as we recognize that disruption is inevitable. The alternative is to end up with the worst of both worlds, in which a closed and collapsing system of global trade breeds even more inequality.
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Turkey parliament moves country toward presidential system | Fox News - 0 views
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Published January 15, 2017 Associated Press Facebook0 Twitter0 Email Print ISTANBUL – Turkey's parliament has moved a step closer to approving a constitutional reform package that would pave the way for a presidential system. In a session that ended late Sunday in Ankara, a majority of lawmakers voted in favor of the final article in the controversial package presented by the ruling party.
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Critics see the changes as a bid to cement outsized powers already exercised by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
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International - Dorian Jones - Evolution Comes Under Fire in Turkey's Higher Education ... - 0 views
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Critics believe that Turkey's governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has Islamist roots, was the real organizational force behind the meeting. Earlier this year, in defense of provisions for classes on the Islamic prophet Mohammed, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that "all children will be brought up as good Muslims.
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Defenders of evolution have long complained that, during its decade-long rule, the (AKP) government has increasingly downplayed evolution theories in textbooks at the expense of creationist explanations. Officially, teachers are supposed to teach both concepts, but they are given great latitude in their classrooms.
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"The reason for having this symposium in a university is an attempt on their part to create a perception that being against evolution is supported and acknowledged by universities and the scientific world," charged Suat Bozkurt, director of Egitim Sen's Istanbul branch. The ministry downplayed such claims, saying that Turkish public schools explore all ideas. Cankocak, the physics professor, disputed official assertions, countering that many incoming university students are unfamiliar with evolutionary concepts. "My students did not learn evolution in high schools, so, therefore, in my university 90 out of 100 [students] don't believe or don't know evolution," he complained. "But it's worse in other universities."
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government support for creationism began after the 1980 military coup d'état, when Turkey's ruling generals vigorously encouraged Islamic beliefs as a counterweight to left-wing political ideas that enjoyed a wide following in Turkey at the time. Along with purging many teachers for liberal or leftist political sympathies, the policy introduced creationism into school textbooks and compulsory religious education.
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In Scandal, Turkey's Leaders May Be Losing Their Tight Grip on News Media - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Mr. Erdogan’s lawyers have also filed suit against a newspaper columnist, once a reliable supporter of the prime minister, for his critical Twitter messages.
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reports on the discovery of $4.5 million in cash stuffed in shoe boxes at the home of a director of a state bank.
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“We would never have expected anything like this,” said Numar Baki, a waiter at an Istanbul cafe, referring to the public nature of the scandal.
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slow erosion of what had been Mr. Erdogan’s iron grip on all levels of power within Turkish society.
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hen Nazli Ilicak, a longtime journalist here, lost her job recently at the pro-government newspaper Sabah after emerging as a strong voice against the government’s handling of the corruption inquiry, she said she would simply keep up her criticism on Twitter and on independent websites.
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Followers of the Muslim spiritual leader Fethullah Gulen, who is in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, have over the years secured top positions in the judiciary and the police and are said to be leading the corruption investigation.
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“Shoulder to shoulder against fascism” and “This is just the beginning. The struggle continues” — slogans like those raised during the antigovernment protests last May and June.
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“I think I should only tweet about penguins from now on,” Mr. Zeynalov wrote on Twitter after the case was filed, referring to some television channels’ practice of broadcasting a documentary about penguins last spring rather than reporting on the antigovernment protests.
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“Erdogan wants to show that this is a conspiracy, that the United States and Israel are behind it,” he said. “Under no circumstances does he want to talk about corruption.
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Turkish Leader Disowns Trials That Helped Him Tame Military - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In an assertion reminiscent of the many denials over the years by the officers and their lawyers, Mr. Erdogan’s office released a statement saying that the recordings released on Monday were “a product of an immoral montage that is completely false.”
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Many of the prosecutors and investigators in both cases — the corruption inquiry and the old military trials — are followers of Fethullah Gulen,
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Recently, under pressure from the government, Turkish lawmakers voted to abolish the special courts in which the officers were tried, a significant step toward new trials. Variations of these courts, set up under antiterrorism laws, have been in place in Turkey since the 1970s. They operate under special rules that allow secret witnesses and wiretaps that would not be admissible in regular courts.
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More remarkably, one of the judges involved in the trials, Koksal Sengun, recently said that he had never read all the indictments, and that if he had he would never have accepted them as legitimate. “I would have rejected the indictment for many reasons now,” he said in an interview with the Turkish news website T24.
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top adviser to Mr. Erdogan, Yalcin Akdogan, who is considered the prime minister’s mouthpiece, has called those military cases a “plot against their own country’s national army,” which is now being replicated in the corruption investigation against the government. A government watchdog recently issued a report that determined that some of the evidence against the military was manipulated.
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That makes them vulnerable to manipulation for political ends, legal analysts say. “The courts are specially designed for the government to use the judicial forces against opponents,” said Metin Feyzioglu, the head of Turkey’s bar association. “They managed to get the military out of politics,” but “that was not the right way to do it.”
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These cases, Ergenekon and Sledgehammer, are the two pillars of Erdogan’s now autocratic system,” said Selim Yavuz, a lawyer who represents his father, a former army general who was convicted and imprisoned in Sledgehammer. “People saw if he could do this to the army, he could do it to anyone. Now he is seen as the almighty.”
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In 2005, years before the trials, a man affiliated with the Gulen movement approached Eric S. Edelman, then the American ambassador, at a party in Istanbul and handed him an envelope containing a handwritten document that supposedly laid out a plan for an imminent coup. But as Mr. Edelman recounted, he gave the documents to his colleagues and they were determined to be forgeries.
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is putting new light on what has been hailed, here and abroad, as Mr. Erdogan’s most important achievement: securing civilian control over the military. The way it was done, however, is now increasingly viewed as an act of revenge by Turkey’s Islamists against their former oppressors in the military
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n now moving to discredit some of the evidence, Mr. Erdogan’s government is walking a tightrope, clinging to its record of democratizing the country and removing the military from politics, while putting distance between itself and the tactics employed to do so.
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When the corruption investigation went public, Gareth Jenkins, a longtime writer and analyst in Turkey, said he noticed several similarities in tactics to the investigation of the military, and listed them: the same prosecutors, the use of simultaneous dawn raids on the homes and offices of suspects, an immediate defamation campaign in the Gulen-affiliated news media, and the leaks of wiretapped conversations.
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They substantially weakened the military politically and empowered a mafia within the state,” Mr. Rodrik said. “That’s their record.”
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shared by julia rhodes on 06 Mar 14
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3 Gulf Countries Pull Ambassadors From Qatar Over Its Support of Islamists - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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history politics gulf countries pull qatar support
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Tensions between Qatar and neighboring Persian Gulf monarchies broke out Wednesday when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from the country over its support of the Muslim Brotherhood and allied Islamists around the region.
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The concerted effort to isolate Qatar, a tiny, petroleum-rich peninsula, was an extraordinary rebuke of its strategy of aligning with moderate Islamists in the hope of extending its influence amid the Arab Spring revolts.But in recent months Islamists’ gains have been rolled back, with the military takeover in Egypt, the governing party shaken in Turkey, chaos in Libya and military gains by the government in Syria.
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The Saudi monarchs, in particular, have grumbled for years as tiny Qatar has swaggered around like a heavyweight. It used its huge wealth and Al Jazeera, which it owns, as instruments of regional power. It negotiated a peace deal in Lebanon, supported Palestinian militants in Gaza, shipped weapons to rebels in Libya and Syria, and gave refuge to exiled leaders of Egypt’s Brotherhood — all while certain its own security was assured by the presence of a major American military base.
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All four gulf countries actively back the Syrian rebels against President Bashar al-Assad, and all see Shiite Iran as a regional rival. But now the split with Qatar makes it harder for the West to work with them as a group on common concerns like Iran or Syria.
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. The internal tensions make it harder for Washington to reassure the nervous governments in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia that American negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program will not undermine gulf security.
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In its own statement, Qatar expressed “surprise and regret” and denied that the rift had anything to do with “security and stability.”
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“The whole issue is really about Sisi,” he said. “These countries are supporting a coup d’état” and “they want Qatar to support such a policy” but “we will never support another regime that kills its own people.”
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Qatar, on the other hand, was Egypt’s most important donor when the Brotherhood was in power. Doha, along with London and Istanbul, has become a hub for Brotherhood leaders in exile.
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The United Arab Emirates state news media reported last month that its government had summoned Qatar’s ambassador to express “extreme resentment” at a declaration on Al Jazeera by Sheik Qaradawi that the Emirates “has always been opposed to Islamic rule.”
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shared by julia rhodes on 26 Aug 13
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Other Nations Offer a Lesson to Egypt's Military Leaders - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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military leaders egypt nytimes atatuk turkey middle east crisis policy history
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The turmoil highlights the central role of the military in some postcolonial Muslim countries, where at least in the fitful early stages of democracy, it forcefully imposes itself as the self-appointed arbiter of power and the guardian of national identity.
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But a look at other Muslim countries that have struggled with democratic transitions, including two other polestars of the Muslim world, Pakistan and Turkey, should provide a kind of warning to General Sisi.
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In Turkey, a court recently imprisoned dozens of senior military officers on charges of plotting to overthrow the government, a punitive reminder to a military once accustomed to reasserting its authority through coups.
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Though General Sisi is riding a wave of popularity among some Egyptians and neighboring countries, notably Saudi Arabia and Israel, for cracking down on Islamists, the events in Turkey and Pakistan have shown the limits of military power.
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Military and civilian leaders have been competing for power in Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt for decades. The military has exercised muscular influence in all three countries, openly or behind the scenes, because of weak civilian rule that can be traced to the foundation of the states — in some cases, in a bid to circumscribe Islamist influence.
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Yet as all three countries climb the ladder toward functioning democracies, the effort is complicated by outside pressure, which often favors the military.
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Pakistani, Turkish and Egyptian generals profess to love democracy, but they practice it with varying degrees of reluctance.
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Instead, the military has deeply embedded itself in each state’s DNA, winning privileges and lucrative jobs for its officers, all the while controlling politics in blunt fashion. Pakistan’s generals have mounted four coups over the past 55 years; Turkey has had three. In both Pakistan and Egypt, analysts describe the military as the core of the “deep state.”
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In all three countries, Islam is often seen as the boogeyman of democracy, Dr. Nasr said. “But that is wrong. The real struggle in the Middle East is between civilian rule and the military.”
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For years, Turkey was the model of progress for many Muslim countries. But the military’s retreat has been driven, in part, by the country’s desire to join the European Union. And the gloss of civilian rule vanished in June when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan violently suppressed a protest movement in central Istanbul, suggesting that one authoritarianism was being replaced with another. This month’s treason trial brought out sharp divisions between secularists and Islamists, underscoring how Turkey’s nation-building model remains a work in progress.
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Egypt’s generals ousted the monarchy and established a republic in 1952. Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a military revolutionary, led a fierce secularization drive in the 1920s.
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His support from Egyptian civic society could evaporate as revulsion grows at the bloodshed against Islamists and the military’s crackdown on other dissenters. If he alienates Western support, financing from the Middle East cannot sustain his country for very long. And, as events in Turkey and Pakistan have shown, the military’s eminence can endure only by strategically ceding space to civilian players — or the use of violent repression.
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shared by julia rhodes on 15 Sep 13
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Turkey's ailing sultan - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition - 0 views
mondediplo.com/06turkey
economics US policy history culture politics crisis monde turkey sultan syria erdogan
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“Increasingly, democratisation and authoritarianism are going hand in hand, and not just in Turkey.”
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Erdogan’s ambition to institute an enhanced presidency with himself as a new “sultan” now looks unlikely to succeed after his imperious response to the protests over the development of Gezi Park
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For the first time, Erdogan, who had confidently steered Turkey through choppy waters, seemed at a loss
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His other recent attempts at social control (restrictions on the sale of alcohol or moves to end abortion, which he has described as murder) infuriated secular Turks, but were aimed at winning votes from Muslim conservatives in this still divided society.
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Secular intellectuals regard Gezi as a turning point: in the first major political protests since the 1970s, an apolitical younger generation has become politicised — not by big ideas like democracy or nationalism, but for their rights. They were joined by activists for Kurdish, Alevi and gay rights — a coming together of separate causes that is new to Turkey.
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As it built its own coalitions at home, it set out internationally to demonstrate that Islam was compatible with democracy. The policy worked. The AKP was re-elected on 22 July 2007, and won a triumphant third term in the 12 June 2011 elections
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The AKP, though not democratic, became a democratising force, giving a new sense of belonging and empowerment to a majority of Turks, previously excluded by the old secular elites
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His worsening authoritarianism escaped the world’s attention, although in Turkey, there were worries about unaccountability and crony capitalism, the penetration of Fethullah Gulen’s Islamist movement into the police and judiciary, the silencing of the media, and the arrest of many journalists and other critics of the government
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It is clear the justice system is not free of politics and has failed to investigate evidence of wider involvement in criminal activity and human rights abuses, particularly in the southeast. Yet with the verdicts, Turkey’s demilitarisation has been underlined.
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Much of the AKP success story was based on the economy, which it opened up, building on structural adjustment reforms by the former economy minister Kemal Derviş (2001-02).
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. On Cyprus, there is a sense that the AKP government has done what it can, backing the UN peace plan proposed by Kofi Annan for a federal solution.
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he AKP government’s biggest achievement so far — and greatest remaining challenge — is its attempt at a solution to the Kurdish question.
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“We used to see self-determination as the only solution... Now our Kurds want to look west. Both for economic benefits and because of the regional conjunction, Kurds here see their future in a democratising Turkey that recognises their rights.” Those rights mean an end to ethnic discrimination, full recognition of Kurdish identity with the right to teach Kurdish at school and a decentralisation that will lead to a form of autonomy. For this, constitutional reform is needed.
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Further diplomatic incidents led to Turkey’s suspension of military, though not economic, ties with Israel that October. This made Erdogan the darling of the Arab world and played well with the Turkish public. Washington under Obama was not dissatisfied. Then came the Mavi Mamari affair, when a Turkish flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza was attacked in international waters on 31 May 2010 and nine Turkish activists killed. This year, after a very public row, the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu apologised.
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There were miscalculations on Syria. After Turkey’s close alliance with President Bashar al-Assad was swiftly reversed at the start of the uprising, Turkey facilitated the rebels, set up refugee camps along the shared border and allowed the opposition Syrian National Council to set up its headquarters in Istanbul. Ordinary Turks welcomed Syria’s refugees but there was no enthusiasm for military involvement, with the risks of unrest among the country’s own Alevi minority (3) and concern at the porous borders that allow infiltration of Al-Qaida-linked jihadists into Turkey.
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Turkey and Iran Put Tensions Aside, for a Day - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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ISTANBUL — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey accused Iran last month of trying to “dominate the region” through its proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, suggesting to some that Turkey was shifting toward confrontation with its neighbor and joining a Saudi-led coalition to push back against Iranian influence across the Middle East.
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Yet it was all smiles and handshakes in Tehran on Tuesday, as Mr. Erdogan was welcomed by Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, at the start of a one-day visit that had been long planned but was put in jeopardy after some Iranian lawmakers called for it to be canceled after Mr. Erdogan’s comments.
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In a joint news conference broadcast live on state television, Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Rouhani pledged to work together to calm regional crises. “The region is burning in a fire,” Mr. Erdogan said. “So far, more than 300,000 were killed in Syria. All were Muslim. We do not know who is killing whom. We have to get united and block the killing and bloodshed.”
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The Iranian president called for an end to the Saudi-led airstrike campaign in Yemen — Tuesday was its 13th day — and for all Middle Eastern countries to “fight terrorism and extremism” together.
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All Roads Lead to Istanbul - By James Traub | Foreign Policy - 0 views
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It's great to be Turkey just now. The economy, barely scathed by the global recession, grew 11.7 percent in the first quarter of this year, and 10.3 percent in the second. Like the Ottoman Empire reborn, Turkey has sponsored a visa-free zone with Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and is moving toward creating a free trade zone as well. And Turkey is a force not just in its neighborhood but, increasingly, in the world.
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diplomatically, Turkey matters more than the others do. Among them, only Turkey is overwhelmingly Muslim and located in the Middle East, within hailing distance of practically every crisis zone on the planet. And thus the question of what kind of force Turkey will be matters more as well.
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All Roads Lead to Istanbul - By James Traub | Foreign Policy - 0 views
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It's a caricature to say that Turkey has chosen the Middle East, or Islam, over the West. Turkey's aspiration for full membership in the club of the West, including the European Union, is still a driving force. But Turkey aspires to many things, and some may contradict each other. The country wants to be a regional power in a region deeply suspicious of the West, of Israel, and of the United States; a Sunni power acting as a broker for Sunnis in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere; a charter member of the new nexus of emerging powers around the world; and a dependable ally of the West. When Turkey is forced to choose among these roles, the neighborhood tends to win out, and that's when you get votes against sanctions on Iran.
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From the time of Kemal Ataturk, Turkey has been committed to its "European vocation." But Ataturk was a modernizer, not a liberal; one of his slogans was "For the people, despite the people." And if Kemalist secularism was not a formula for European-style liberal individualism, it's scarcely clear that the AKP's market-oriented moderate Islamic restoration is, either
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Turkey is a success story that the West has every reason to welcome. The image of moderation and tolerant cosmopolitanism that it offers to Middle Eastern audiences contributes not only to Turkish soft power but to global peace and security, at least in the long run.
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shared by julia rhodes on 25 Dec 13
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3 Turkish Ministers Resign Amid Corruption Scandal - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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turkish corruption scandal nytimes US history politics crisis policy culture economic
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Three Turkish cabinet ministers resigned on Wednesday in an intensifying corruption scandal that has challenged the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and polarized the country.
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Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan and Interior Minister Muammer Guler, both of whose sons have been arrested in the anticorruption investigation, stepped down.
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Hours later, Erdogan Bayraktar, the environment and urban planning minister, announced his resignation in an interview with the private NTV television network. Mr. Bayraktar’s son was detained as part of the corruption probe but later released.
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Mr. Erdogan’s government has denounced the inquiry as a politically motivated plot by a “criminal gang” within the state.
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The prime minister’s allies have also characterized it as a foreign plot to undermine Turkey’s rise and damage the government ahead of elections in March. Responding to the investigation, the government has dismissed more than a dozen high-ranking police officials as part of a purge of those it believes are behind the probe.
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The investigation has been linked to the followers of Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive Muslim preacher who lives in Pennsylvania and leads an influential Islamic movement.
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But in recent years, it appears a rift has grown between the men, as Mr. Gulen has challenged Mr. Erdogan in key areas, including foreign policy.
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The Turkish news media reported that $4.5 million in cash was found packed in shoe boxes in the home of the chief executive of a state-run bank, while a money-counting machine and piles of bank notes were reported to have been discovered in the bedroom of a government minister’s son.
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The inquiry could prove to be one of the most potent challenges yet to Mr. Erdogan’s government, which was buffeted this summer by large demonstrations in a cherished Istanbul park by mostly liberal and secular-minded protesters who were angry at what they perceived as Mr. Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies.
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Mr. Erdogan’s intervention in the inquiry has drawn criticism from within his Justice and Development Party and threatens to undermine the unity of the party, known for its discipline, before a series of elections scheduled for the next 18 months.
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Turkish Leader, Using Conflicts, Cements Power - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In Turkey, the president is technically second to the prime minister. But in practice, when Mr. Erdogan was elected president in August, he absorbed the power and privilege of the prime minister’s post into his new position. And like Mr. Putin, who also shifted between the presidency and prime minister’s office, the stronger Mr. Erdogan has grown, the tenser relations have become with the United States.
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he has used his conflict with Washington and his political enemies as a force to help consolidate power, as he continues to carry out the duties associated with the prime minister. He has rallied his conservative base behind his religiously infused agenda, clashing with United States policy for confronting Islamic State militants, while also blaming foreign interference for the growing catalog of crises he faces. As Turkey’s challenges have magnified — fighting on its border with Syria, strained relations with its NATO allies, pressure on the economy — Mr. Erdogan’s authority has grown only stronger.
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Turkey’s continued refusal to allow the United States to use its bases for airstrikes against the Islamic State’s forces in Syria and Iraq — and insistence that the coalition target the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria — has laid bare deep divisions between the two countries that have prompted analysts to question Turkey’s reliability as an ally, and some have even suggested that Turkey be expelled from NATO.
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Mr. Erdogan offered an assessment appealing to his religious Sunni Muslim base — and echoed by militants with the Islamic State — that the Middle East crisis stems from the actions of the British and French after World War I, and the borders drawn between Iraq and Syria under the Sykes-Picot pact. Mr. Erdogan invoked Sykes-Picot saying, “each conflict in this region has been designed a century ago.” He suggested a new plot was underway, and that “journalists, religious men, writers and terrorists” were the collective reincarnation of T.E. Lawrence, the British diplomat and spy immortalized in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia.”
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Mr. Erdogan has partly consolidated his power by purging thousands of police officers, prosecutors and judges who he believed were behind the corruption probe. He accused those people of being followers of the Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania and who once was an important ally to Mr. Erdogan. His victory over Mr. Gulen in the power struggle that ensued has largely erased a moderate, Western-leaning Islamic voice from the Turkish governing elite
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“For Tayyip Erdogan, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Muslim movements everywhere, the problems of the Muslim world are because of the West,” said Rusen Cakir, a scholar of Islamist movements who lives in Istanbul.For Mr. Gulen, he said, “the problems for the Muslim world are because of Muslims themselves.”
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Suat Kiniklioglu, a former lawmaker with Mr. Erdogan’s party who is now an outspoken critic, said the speech referring to Sykes-Picot demonstrated “how much Erdogan detests Western powers operating in the region.”Omer Taspinar, a scholar on Turkey at the Brookings Institution, said: “The Lawrence of Arabia speech was a part of this act — to show how the borders of the Middle East were drawn up by imperialists and how we are face to face with a new Western agenda.”
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This deep-seated view that the problems of the Middle East can be explained by Western actions over the past century, combined with a measure of ambivalence among Turkish religious conservatives who form the core of his constituency about joining the West in a fight against Sunnis, help explain Mr. Erdogan’s reluctance to take a stronger role in the United States-led military coalition.
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BBC News - What's the appeal of a caliphate? - 0 views
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In June the leader of Islamic State declared the creation of a caliphate stretching across parts of Syria and Iraq - Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi named himself the caliph or leader. Edward Stourton examines the historical parallels and asks what is a caliphate, and what is its appeal?
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The last caliphate - that of the Ottomans - was officially abolished 90 years ago this spring. Yet in a 2006 Gallup survey of Muslims living in Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia and Pakistan, two-thirds of respondents said they supported the goal of "unifying all Islamic countries" into a new caliphate
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"Seventy years after the Prophet's death, this Muslim world stretched from Spain and Morocco right the way to Central Asia and to the southern bits of Pakistan, so a huge empire that was all… under the control of a single Muslim leader," says historian Prof Hugh Kennedy. "And it's this Muslim unity, the extent of Muslim sovereignty, that people above all look back to."
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The caliphate was finally extinguished by Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, in 1924. He believed the abolition of the institution was essential to his campaign to turn what was left of the empire into a 20th Century secular nation state. The last Ottoman caliph was expelled from Istanbul to live out a life of cultured exile in Paris and on the Cote d'Azur.
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n the early days of the Arab Spring, the revolutions in countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were interpreted in Western capitals as evidence that the Muslim future lay with democracy. Then in Egypt came the overthrow of the democratically-elected Muslim Brotherhood government by the army under General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi - and then came the horrors of Islamic State amid the bloody chaos of civil strife in Syria and Iraq
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Many classical Sunni scholars challenge the very notion that the caliphate is a political project. Sheikh Ruzwan Mohammed, for example, argues that the key to the caliphate is really spiritual. "I think the Islamic State should come from within," he says. "It should be an Islamic State first and foremost of mind and soul." And the overwhelming majority, even of those who do believe that a new caliphate is a realistic political objective, completely reject the violence espoused by the self-styled Islamic Stat
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But IS has skilfully exploited the elements in the caliphate's history which best serve its purposes. The historian Hugh Kennedy has pointed out, for example, that their black uniforms and flags deliberately echo the black robes the Abbasids adopted as their court dress in the 8th Century, thus recalling Islam's Golden Age. And their original title - the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant - harks back to the days when there was no national border between the two countries, because both territories were part of the great Islamic caliphate.
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Turkey Confirms Strikes Against Kurdish Militias in Syria - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ey-syria-kurdish-militias.html
politics history US culture crisis policy economic syria turkey
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ISTANBUL — Turkey has confirmed that it struck positions in Syria held by Kurdish militias that over the last year have become the most important allies within Syria of the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State.
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In an interview on a Turkish news channel Monday night, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey did not specify when the strikes had taken place, but he said they came after Ankara warned Kurdish fighters not to move west of the Euphrates River.
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The armed wing of the P.Y.D., the People’s Protection Units, said in a statement that Turkey had struck its positions in Tal Abyad on Saturday and Sunday, and that a separate Turkish attack, on Sunday in the village of Buban, had wounded two civilians.
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The limited Turkish strikes came after the P.Y.D. declared last week that Tal Abyad was part of an autonomous region in northern Syria that the Kurds call Rojava. Turkey views the development as a national security threat because it could inflame separatist sentiments among its own Kurds
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Russia’s ties to the P.K.K. and the P.Y.D. date to the days of the Soviet Union, and it is believed to be offering support to Syrian Kurds.To register its displeasure, Turkey recently summoned the ambassadors of Russia and the United States to raise concerns over support to the Syrian Kurds.
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50 tons of ammunition in northern Syria to a coalition of Arab and Kurdish fighters who were preparing to battle the Islamic State near its Syrian stronghold of Raqqa.
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This video shows what ancient Rome actually looked like - Vox - 0 views
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It's impossible for anyone to see what ancient Rome looked like in all of its splendor, since we've failed to invent a time machine. But the above video, which shows a 3D rendering of Rome in 320 AD, is about as close as we can get
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Rome Reborn, an academic research project whose central mission is to create a full model of Rome at its greatest heights, working in conjunction with the Khan Academy and Smarthistory. The goal is to take historical depictions of the city and create a true-to-life model of every period of Roman development, ranging from 1000 BC to 552 AD.
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they chose to use 320 AD for this visualization because it was "the peak of Rome's urban development." Ten years later, the emperor, Constantine, moved the capital to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), and the city of Rome began to decline. (The Roman Empire itself went on to survive, in various forms, until roughly 476.)
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At this point, Rome had somewhere between 1 million and 2 million residents. For perspective, 2 million residents would make Rome bigger than every American city today except for New York, LA, Chicago, and Houston. And this was 1700 years ago!
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nterestingly, Rome itself isn't built near potable water. According to Frischer, the Romans managed to support a modern-size metropolis using an absolutely massive system of aqueducts — literally "roads for water" that brought in clean stuff from nearby mountains and rivers.
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The video shows the Colosseum as it would have looked at its full size, which is truly colossal. We also learn that the Colosseum wasn't what Romans called it (that name dates to later, in the Middle Ages). It was actually called the Flavian Amphitheater, built by the Emperor Vespasian in a bid to gain popularity after his mad predecessor, Nero, allowed huge portions of the city to burn down.
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Russian warship fires warning shots at Turkish fishing boat - BBC News - 0 views
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Russia says one of its warships fired warning shots at a Turkish fishing boat in the Aegean Sea to avoid a collision.
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Relations remain tense between the two countries since Turkey's shooting down of a Russian warplane.
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"We are not in favour of tension," Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was quoted as saying after the incident."We have always been in favour of overcoming tensions through dialogue rather than conflict."
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"We were not aware that they had fired shots at us," Muzaffer Gecici said. "We have video footage and we have handed this to the coastguard. We didn't even know it was a Russian ship."
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And last week, Turkey complained over what it said was a sailor on a Russian naval ship brandishing a missile launcher as the vessel passed through Istanbul. R
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President Vladimir Putin described as a "stab in the back" Turkey's downing of the Russian bomber and has imposed economic sanctions.
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With Turkey refusing to apologise over the incident, Russia announces a package of economic sanctions against Turkey, including restrictions on imports and travel.
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Turkey condemns Russian "provocation" after Turkish media publish an image showing a Russian serviceman holding a rocket launcher aboard a warship passing through the Bosphorus.
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"Despite numerous attempts by the crew of the Smetlivy, the crew of the Turkish fishing boat did not make radio contact and did not respond to visual signals by semaphore or warning flares,"
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A Turkish F-16 fighter jet shoots down a Russian Su-24 attack aircraft, allegedly because it violated Turkish airspace
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The lost voices of 20th century's first genocide return - CNN.com - 0 views
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Francis Alys' film The Silence of Ani begins with the rustling of wind through a breathtaking city that now lies in ruins. In the ancient stone, we see eagles carved out, and slowly a melody of birdcalls rises to crescendo -- revealed to be the sound of flute whistles played by children darting between the debris.
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Ani, silent since the 17th century, speaks of a more modern absence: of the Armenian populations across Turkey who were killed and deported by Ottoman forces in 1915, and of a catastrophe whose name it is forbidden to teach in Turkish classrooms.
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Erdogan currently faces mounting pressure from international leaders to recognize the genocide as a deliberate campaign orchestrated by his country's Ottoman Empire ancestors -- and Christov-Bakargiev believes art can alter the course of this political debate.
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8 facts about the Armenian genocide 100 years ago - CNN.com - 0 views
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The mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which began 100 years ago Friday, is said by some scholars and others to have been the first genocide of the 20th century, even though the word "genocide" did not exist at the time.
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Some Turks still view the Armenians as having been a threat to the Ottoman Empire in a time of war, and say many people of various ethnicities -- including Turks -- were killed in the chaos of war.
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The Ottoman Turks, having recently entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were worried that Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire would offer wartime assistance to Russia. Russia had long coveted control of Constantinople (now Istanbul), which controlled access to the Black Sea -- and therefore access to Russia's only year-round seaports.
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How many Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the mass killings?Many historians agree that the number was about 2 million. However, victims of the mass killings also included some of the 1.8 million Armenians living in the Caucasus under Russian rule, some of whom were massacred by Ottoman forces in 1918 as they marched through East Armenia and Azerbaijan.
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on the night of April 23-24, 1915, the authorities in Constantinople, the empire's capital, rounded up about 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. Many of them ended up deported or assassinated.
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Estimates range from 300,000 to 2 million deaths between 1914 and 1923, with not all of the victims in the Ottoman Empire
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Some show Ottoman soldiers posing with severed heads, others with them standing amid skulls in the dirt.The victims are reported to have died in mass burnings and by drowning, torture, gas, poison, disease and starvation. Children were reported to have been loaded into boats, taken out to sea and thrown overboard. Rape, too, was frequently reported.
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The issue of whether to call the killings a genocide is emotional, both for Armenians, who are descended from those killed, and for Turks, the heirs to the Ottomans. For both groups, the question touches as much on national identity as on historical facts.
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Who calls the mass killings of Armenians a genocide?Armenia, the Vatican, the European Parliament, France, Russia and Canada. Germany is expected to join that group on Friday, the 100th anniversary of the start of the killings.
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No. Genocide was not even a word at the time, much less a legally defined crime.The word "genocide" was invented in 1944 by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin to describe the Nazis' systematic attempt to eradicate Jews from Europe. He formed the word by combining the Greek word for race with the Latin word for killing.
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Who does not call the mass killings a genocide?Turkey, the United States, the European Commission, the United Kingdom and the United Nations. A U.N. subcommittee called the killings genocide in 1985, but current U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declines to use the word.