General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTurkey Is in Serious Trouble
I am usually an optimist when it comes to Turkeys future. Indeed, I wrote a whole book about The Rise of Turkey. But these days, Im worried. The country faces a toxic combination of political polarization, government instability, economic slowdown, and threats of violencefrom both inside and outside Turkeythat could soon add up to a catastrophe. The likelihood of that outcome is increasing amid Russias bombing raids in Syria in support of its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which threaten to debilitate the moderate rebels and boost the extremists in Syrias civil war, while leaving Turkey to deal with two unruly neighbors: Assad and ISIS.
Of course, Turkey has gone through periods of political and economic crisis before. During the 1970s, the countrys economy collapsed, and the instability led to fighting among right- and left-wing militant groups and security forces that killed thousands of people. Then, in the 1990s, Turkey was pummeled by triple-digit inflation and a full-blown Kurdish insurgency that killed tens of thousands. Turkey survived both those decades. The historian in me says that Turkey will be able to withstand the coming shock this time as well.
But the analyst in me says that things look different this time.
For one thing, Turkeys Kurdish problem has changed. Until this year, Turkeys 10 to 12 million-strong Kurdish community, representing about 15 percent of the Turkish population, wasnt a unified political force; its internal splits followed the fault lines of the country as a whole. Starting in the 1990s, nationalist Kurds tended to vote for parties sympathetic to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which Turkey and the United States consider a terrorist group, and which fought for decades for independence from the Turkish government. But those voters were not the whole of the Kurdish electorate. Since the 1960s, the left-leaning Alevi Kurds, who adhere to a liberal branch of Islam, have voted for the social-democratic Republican Peoples Party, which is a secular, Turkish-nationalist movement. More importantly, conservative Kurds, who by my estimate represent nearly half of the Kurdish population, have tended to vote for the governing, pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) ever since it was established by former prime minister, and current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2001.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/turkey-isis-russia-pkk/408988/
MADem
(135,425 posts)big smile, and cheerily tell the people that the military will be handling things for awhile, until the bumps are smoothed out. Then, after a time, they'd have elections and all would be well again.
Usually things would be so messed up that people wouldn't mind--Attaturk had given them the "feelgood" POV towards the Armed Forces.
They've been defanged, lately though. I doubt they've got the organizational will to pull that off anytime soon.
As for the Kurds, they're persecuting them "just for fun" less, it would seem. It was pretty awful to be Kurdish in Turkey for quite a while, there. And the country, as a whole, is getting a whole lot more religious--all the headscarfs and "Islamic" atttiude is a long way from Attaturk's vision.
They do have a massive standing military, though. Question is, would they use it?
riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)and is continuing to pull the levers of power from behind the scenes with his shadow government, undermining the elected pols.
This will end badly.
starroute
(12,977 posts)One is that there seem to be fewer and fewer people who actually believe in those mythical creatures, "moderate rebels." Another is the question of who the author considers to be the "extremists" who would be boosted by Russian bombing raids against ISIS and the al Qaeda affiliates. And a third is how that would leave ISIS alive and kicking to be a threat to Turkey (which seems to have been covertly aiding ISIS, anyway.)
It seems as though the writer doesn't believe Putin's stated intention of taking out ISIS but prefers to believe he's going after Assad's opponents while leaving ISIS untouched. And that's the sort of claim that needs at least a little bit of evidence to back it up.
Oh, yeah. There's also the question of how you can talk about "fighting among right- and left-wing militant groups and security forces" in the 1970s without mentioning the two CIA coups. As I say, these are all things that give me pause.