Personally I see the AKP somewhat positively. Though they are not secularists, they are clearly modern, technocratic, and very very competent. The Christian Democrat (or US Republican) analogy is apt. The thuggishness of the Turkish “left”, as represented by the CHP and the army, has not really been changed by the changes in Turkish society over the last 10 years and consequently feels completely outdated. A rejuvenated secular left, free from Deniz Baykal, would be great, if it could pull the secularists out of the CHP and the military’s grip. Unfortunately non-CHP left rhetoric in Turkey is wrapped up with the Kurdish question—which, for better or worse, is non-negotiable for almost all non-Kurds in Turkey.

A larger problem than the AK/CHP feud is, I think, the rise of virulent Turkish nationalism on both the Islamic and secular side of the spectrum.

If only.

“Instead the military (NOT the Islamists) abolished democracy and started slaughtering people, with, of course, Western help.”

Both may have; the Islamists of Algeria certainly were violently misogynistic.

http://www.hrw.org/reports/1990/WR90/MIDEAST.BOU-01.htm

“The FIS victory at the polls, while a clear expression of popular disenchantment with repressive and ineffectual FLN policies, is a matter of deep concern in certain Algerian circles. Human rights and women’s rights activists and multiparty advocates, who had been at the forefront of demands for reform, question the commitment of FIS to democratic rule. A number of verbal and physical attacks against women and the use of strong—arm tactics against members of rival political parties have underscored their concern. In both cases, Islamic militants have been identified as the culprits.1

The attacks against women have usually occurred during attempts by Islamic fundamentalists to force women to conform to their own strict interpretation of religious precepts, such as wearing particular clothing and limiting their participation in public life. In one incident in April in the town of Blida, several female college students were attacked by bearded men with whips, when they attempted to leave their campus to attend a rally sponsored by the communist Socialist Vanguard Party.2 In another incident in the city of Annaba, Islamic militants burned down the house of a member of a women’s rights association who was leading a campaign against FIS’ attempts to impose Shari’a religious law. Activists accuse the government of adopting a “hands—off” policy toward the perpetrators of such violence. (However, several Islamists received long prison sentences in January 1991 for setting fire in 1989 to the house of a women they accused of having “loose morals.” The sentences, handed down in a court in Ouargla, were reported to be the first time Islamists have received stiff punishments for such attacks.)”

Indeed

http://www.nodo50.org/mujeresred/argelia-shadowreport.html

goes into more detail.

Iran is a possible exception, where there was a broad movement to overthrow the shah. The communists and liberals were then repressed by the Islamists once they took power. Of course, the Islamists didn’t really take power at the ballot box.

For me, the problem is that much of the political elite in Turkey doesn’t accept democracy and human rights. As long as the secular elite is allowed to remain in power, they restrict themselves to killing and oppressing Kurds and radical leftists. But should a non-secular (in the French sense) power be poised to take power, well then the glove has to come off, and this whole “democracy” and “will of the people” thing has to come to an end. No one can be allowed to challenge the “principles” of Attatuk and the sacred right of the army and security services to torture and kill those Turkish citizens it deems to be subversives.

On the Sarkozy thing – it’s unclear whether he can actually stop negotiations, though he can surely make them a hell of a lot more complicated. The negotiation process has been delegated to EU officials, and can’t really be taken back without unanimous agreement among the member states if my understanding of the procedures is correct. However, repeated “over my dead body” pronouncements from Sarkozy, assuming he wins, are obviously going to have an unsettling impact at best on the discussions.

The dynamic that C.L. Ball identifies is a plausible one. However, it still seems to me that the possible effects of AKP over-confidence are less likely to have deleterious consequences than the problems associated with EU cold feet (which effectively remove an outside guarantor from the table and mean that both sides have less incentive to trust each other than they would otherwise). That said, I’m surely not an area expert (I know the EU side pretty well, but have nothing approaching specific academic expertise in domestic Turkish politics)

The wild-card is what the Turkish military’s view of EU membership is: does anyone have a good source on this? I don’t know off-hand. I see no inherent reason to presume the military would be pro-EU simply because it is pro-secular.

Surely all talk of EU membership for Turkey is academic, since Sarkozy – profoundly opposed to Turkey joining – will most likely be elected to the French presidency on Sunday.

Er..yeah and what exactly happened in Algeria?

‘On December 26, 1991, the FIS handily won the first round of parliamentary elections; with 48% of the overall popular vote, they won 188 of the 231 seats contested in that round, putting them far ahead of rivals. The army saw the seeming certainty of resulting FIS rule as unacceptable. On January 11, 1992, it cancelled the electoral process, forcing President Chadli Bendjedid to resign and bringing in the exiled independence fighter Mohammed Boudiaf to serve as a new president. Many FIS members were arrested, including FIS number three leader Abdelkader Hachani on January 22. A state of emergency was declared, and the government officially dissolved FIS on March 4. On July 12, Abbassi Madani and Ali Belhadj were sentenced to 12 years in prison.’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Salvation_Front

Now don’t get me wrong. Perhaps the Islamic Salvation Front would have been just as awful as some people thought (although would it really have been worse than our staunch ally in the region, Saudi Arabia?). But the fact is that

a: the party did NOT get an overall majority: it got 48% and

b: the party was not allowed to fairly take part in the ‘real’ elections that should have followed.

Instead the military (NOT the Islamists) abolished democracy and started slaughtering people, with, of course, Western help.

The power of Islamic parties is obviously not to be underestimated, but when it is put to the ballot box, it is rarely quite as strong as Westerners tend to assume. Even in Palestine, Hamas did not win an overall majority of the vote, getting only 42.9% (and of course, the President remains Abbas, a member of Fatah).

In fact, to the best of my knowledge NO radical Islamic Party has EVER come to power via free and fair elections and then gone onto abolish democracy (as ‘Westerners’ tend to assume will happen).

However, it is certainly true that FEAR of an ‘Islamic takeover’ is frequently used in the West as an excuse to cancel elections when it looks like Governments that are not friendly to ‘Western interests’ (a euphemism) might get elected.

But what about countries where the Islamist version of democracy means, “One man, one vote, one time”? God’s party gets voted in and takes its mandate to mean it can never be voted out again. I’m thinking here of Algeria in the mid-90s, but surely there are other examples. What are US and EU interests in such cases?

US … it says rather a lot about their actual, as opposed to their nominal, commitment to the spread of democracy

With the US now forced to kiss up to every thug in the region, including the Syrians and Iranians, in order get our butts our of Iraq, any hope of cultivating a better class of friends there is lost. I fully expect that the Lebanese will be sold to the Syrians for Syrian cooperation.

I fear that we are right back where we were on September 10, 2001.

Posted by P O’Neill ·

After the ‘Cedar Revolutionaries’ beloved by right-wingers turned in an instant to ‘bomb all of the sand-n*ggers and let God sort them out’ last summer, that most people outside of the GOP in the USA had gotten the message about democracy.