Monday, June 05, 2006
Understanding Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Επειδή πολλά υπερβολικά λέγονται και γράφονται, υπερ-απλοποιώντας το τρέχον πολιτικό πλαίσιο στην Τουρκία, ιδού ένα συναρπαστικό άρθρο που γράφτηκε πριν από σχεδόν τρία χρόνια, με πρωταγωνιστή τον πρωθυπουργό της αντιπάλου μας χώρας, τον Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Γιά τους μη διαθέτοντες χρόνο, παραθέτουμε χαρακτηριστικά αποσπάσματα:
Like a patient nodding to the dentist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 49, signaled he was ready to be interviewed. It seemed clear that he would have preferred to stretch out on the carpet and go to sleep.
''He doesn't come from a palace. When he shops, he carries the bags himself.''
Erdogan knows that many in the establishment distrust him or look down on him or do both. He knows they can't quite believe that Erdogan is their prime minister; indeed, many seem embarrassed by his ignorance of foreign languages and by the head scarf that his wife wears as an emblem of her faith. He knows they are suspicious of his claims that he has evolved and that they imagine him to have a secret plan to impose religion on the nation. ''I have faced this all my life,'' Erdogan said.
But he is weary of it. ''Before anything else, I'm a Muslim,'' Erdogan said. ''As a Muslim, I try to comply with the requirements of my religion. I have a responsibility to God, who created me, and I try to fulfill that responsibility. But I try now very much to keep this away from my political life, to keep it private.'' Poker-faced, he exhaled. ''A political party cannot have a religion. Only individuals can. Otherwise, you'd be exploiting religion, and religion is so supreme that it cannot be exploited or taken advantage of.''
As secular nationalism became Turkey's religion, the military took on the role of protecting Ataturk's legacy, which meant keeping elected officials on a leash and overthrowing or undermining them if necessary. Erdogan himself is unofficially on probation. Turkey's ''deep state'' sees its duty as preventing the nation from backsliding into religion and ethnic, especially Kurdish, separatism. Islam was, of course, never snuffed out. While most Turks came to consider themselves Turks first, they were still Muslims. And from the start, especially in the heartland, traditional Islam survived despite repression. To this day, in what seems an arcane, self-defeating expression of Turkey's secularism, women wearing head scarves are not allowed to attend universities or work in government. Prime Minister Erdogan's two daughters, in fact, go to Indiana University, where they are free to cover their hair and get a degree at the same time. His wife does not appear at state functions lest her designer head scarf provoke fears of an imminent theocracy.
Yet from the moment he pronounced himself the ''imam'' of Istanbul, Erdogan began both provoking anxieties and recoiling from the fact that he had provoked them.
They (Erdogan and his comrades) decided to start a new party that would aim for a broader political base. They would stop conducting politics with religious symbols and demonstrate instead how true belief informs politics wisely.
Justice and Development would be a party in which religious people could feel at home, but it wouldn't be a religious party
... ''They had this impression that the world was run by Jews,''
The victory was a resounding rejection of the old, corrupt, mismanaged and fragmented Turkish political order. It was also an embrace of Erdogan personally but not of Islamism. On election night, Erdogan immediately sought to reassure the establishment that he would not be an agent of unwanted change. In a news conference, he said that his government would not interfere with anyone's way of life, would uphold Turkey's Western-oriented foreign policy, would abide by an International Monetary Fund rescue plan and would continue the battle for admission to the European Union. The Turkish markets soared.
''He wanted to change the system, but the system changed him,''
''He believes in profits, not prophets.''
The Turks were insulted when the Americans sent a State Department negotiator rather than a senior leader to work out an agreement with them. (Seeking co-operation in the Iraq war).
maybe Erdogan, straddling two worlds, is the perfect person to defuse the tensions between secular and religious forces in Turkey.
Γιά τους μη διαθέτοντες χρόνο, παραθέτουμε χαρακτηριστικά αποσπάσματα:
Like a patient nodding to the dentist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 49, signaled he was ready to be interviewed. It seemed clear that he would have preferred to stretch out on the carpet and go to sleep.
''He doesn't come from a palace. When he shops, he carries the bags himself.''
Erdogan knows that many in the establishment distrust him or look down on him or do both. He knows they can't quite believe that Erdogan is their prime minister; indeed, many seem embarrassed by his ignorance of foreign languages and by the head scarf that his wife wears as an emblem of her faith. He knows they are suspicious of his claims that he has evolved and that they imagine him to have a secret plan to impose religion on the nation. ''I have faced this all my life,'' Erdogan said.
But he is weary of it. ''Before anything else, I'm a Muslim,'' Erdogan said. ''As a Muslim, I try to comply with the requirements of my religion. I have a responsibility to God, who created me, and I try to fulfill that responsibility. But I try now very much to keep this away from my political life, to keep it private.'' Poker-faced, he exhaled. ''A political party cannot have a religion. Only individuals can. Otherwise, you'd be exploiting religion, and religion is so supreme that it cannot be exploited or taken advantage of.''
As secular nationalism became Turkey's religion, the military took on the role of protecting Ataturk's legacy, which meant keeping elected officials on a leash and overthrowing or undermining them if necessary. Erdogan himself is unofficially on probation. Turkey's ''deep state'' sees its duty as preventing the nation from backsliding into religion and ethnic, especially Kurdish, separatism. Islam was, of course, never snuffed out. While most Turks came to consider themselves Turks first, they were still Muslims. And from the start, especially in the heartland, traditional Islam survived despite repression. To this day, in what seems an arcane, self-defeating expression of Turkey's secularism, women wearing head scarves are not allowed to attend universities or work in government. Prime Minister Erdogan's two daughters, in fact, go to Indiana University, where they are free to cover their hair and get a degree at the same time. His wife does not appear at state functions lest her designer head scarf provoke fears of an imminent theocracy.
Yet from the moment he pronounced himself the ''imam'' of Istanbul, Erdogan began both provoking anxieties and recoiling from the fact that he had provoked them.
They (Erdogan and his comrades) decided to start a new party that would aim for a broader political base. They would stop conducting politics with religious symbols and demonstrate instead how true belief informs politics wisely.
Justice and Development would be a party in which religious people could feel at home, but it wouldn't be a religious party
... ''They had this impression that the world was run by Jews,''
The victory was a resounding rejection of the old, corrupt, mismanaged and fragmented Turkish political order. It was also an embrace of Erdogan personally but not of Islamism. On election night, Erdogan immediately sought to reassure the establishment that he would not be an agent of unwanted change. In a news conference, he said that his government would not interfere with anyone's way of life, would uphold Turkey's Western-oriented foreign policy, would abide by an International Monetary Fund rescue plan and would continue the battle for admission to the European Union. The Turkish markets soared.
''He wanted to change the system, but the system changed him,''
''He believes in profits, not prophets.''
The Turks were insulted when the Americans sent a State Department negotiator rather than a senior leader to work out an agreement with them. (Seeking co-operation in the Iraq war).
maybe Erdogan, straddling two worlds, is the perfect person to defuse the tensions between secular and religious forces in Turkey.
