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Clinton And Turkish Press Freedom
Hillary Clinton is currently in Istanbul. The Turkish journalist Mahir Zeynalov tweeted her press conference with the Turkish foreign minister Davutoglov. He thought that one of her statements was rather funny:
lol. Clinton: You don't have freedom of press in Syria as you have here in Turkey.
That lol is certainly deserved. Reporters without borders lists Turkey as number 148 in its press freedom index. That is worse than Russia which the various U.S. editorial writers like to bash for alleged lack of press freedom. Over the last year at least 90 Turkish journalist sat in jail for rather murky reasons. There is also a system of informal censorship through government pressure on editors and media owners.
Clinton is just covering up what every observer can easily see. The U.S. is not at all concerned about human rights or freedom of the press. It is an empire gone mad:
Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s … Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s … Libya 2011 … Syria 2012 … In military conflicts in each of these countries the United States and al Qaeda (or one of its associates) have been on the same side.
What does this tell us about the United States’ “War On Terrorism”?
…
[I]f you want to understand this thing called United States foreign policy … forget about the War on Terrorism, forget about September 11, forget about democracy, forget about freedom, forget about human rights, forget about religion, forget about the people of Libya and Syria … keep your eyes on the prize … Whatever advances American global domination. Whatever suits their goals at the moment. There is no moral factor built into the DNA of US foreign policy.
Well said.
I haven’t really considered a re-run of the Ottoman empire until I say the beeb pitch in favour of it last night.
I raise it because a recent thread running through MoA of late has been “what the fuck is Turkey in particular Erdogan up to and how can it be rational?”
Since posting here I did a bit of a search and came up with a few hundred sites promoting or at least discussing neo-Ottomanism & I reckon it needs to be considered by anyone seeking to get a grasp on what Turkey is about now recognising that kemalism is dead and unlikely to be re-surrected any time soon.
The englander neo-libs like it because it solves a number of immediate problems from how to get the oil without seeming to be a gangster to how to keep Turkey outta the EU without seeming racist. One thing that Turkish neo-colonialism will stop is EC entry. Two reasons (1) as any amerikan or englander knows foreign interventions impact on domestic relations. amerika has become far more oppressive and intrusive at home since gwot and england may have had a decade of relative domestic freedom in the 90’s but life has been dominated by increasing ‘security concerns’ in england from the start of the NI battle of independence thru the Malvinas re-invasion to the invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
That means that whether or not Turkey gets into an open conflict with Syria or not the accelerating support for sunni atrocities around the ME will create a blowback that will make keeping the police/security state no more oppressive that it is now an impossible task, let alone reducing the oppression to a situation where Turkey can gain admittance to the EU.
But (2) may obviate that. If Turkey convinces its population that it is now a major player in the ME again, the pressure will be off from the population to ‘join europe’
Here is an englander blog which sees neo-Ottomanism as a way forward for turkey. The site calls itself “The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies” and reeks of englander intelligence/foreign office wonks. A short quotation from these assholes’ desk:
Over the past decade Prime Minister Rejep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government and his AKP (Justice and Development Party) have been successful in undermining Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s legacy and the character of the state founded upon that legacy. What remains is an increasingly empty shell of constitutional secularism.
That shell was nevertheless an obstacle to the formal grounding of the new legitimacy in Islam at home and neo-Ottomanism abroad. Erdoğan and his team were determined to remove such vestiges, however, and on September 12, 2010, they succeeded. On that day Turkey’s voters approved, by a large margin, a 26-article package which ended the role of the Army as the guardian of secularism. In 2011 Erdoğan was duly re-elected with a substantial majority for a third term.
Davutoglu’s Strategic Depth – What has become known as Turkey’s neo-Ottoman strategy became prominent with the appointment of Ahmet Davutoglu as foreign minister in 2009. As Erdoğan’s long-term foreign policy advisor, he advocated diversifying Turkey’s geopolitical options by creating Turkish zones of influence in the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Middle East. On the day of his appointment Davutoglu asserted that Turkey’s influence in “its region” will continue to grow: Turkey had an “order-instituting role” in the Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus, he declared, quite apart from its links with the West.
You’ll notice the article goes on to claim that neo-Ottomanism will help Turkey join the EU. I reckon that is a furphy (NB none of the definitions mention this but over time furphy has become applied most frequently to the lies told by politicians to get their way).
neo-Ottomanism isn’t big among the englander orientalists whose antecedents (e.g. TE Lawrence, St John Philby) were advocates and wannabe enablers of Turkey’s exit from Arab nations.
One of orientalist, oxbridge ‘don’ Timothy Garton-Ash gets quite heated about the notion:
Garton-Ash told an anecdote that he heard last year, at an occasion in which EU ministers had a meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. “After the meeting one of the foreign ministers made a joke.
He ironically told me he got the impression that Mr. Davutoğlu was inviting the EU to join the Ottoman Empire!”
“I think the EU should avoid defining itself as a Christian club; China should avoid describing itself in purely civilizational terms; and, in the same way, I would warn against Turkey defining itself too much as a centre of a neo-Ottoman civilization. Some people might think that there are some moments when Turkey is doing that,” he added.
What are the amerikan imperialists saying?
A site calling itself ‘open democracy’ burbles on about the beauty of an exhibition of ‘neo-Ottoman’ art before getting down to the nitty gritty, their worldview of amerikan exceptionalism and moral superiority:
It bears repeating: so called “neo-Ottomanism” – latest example being the massive recent (native) box office success of “Fetih 1453”, an epic film glorifying the conquest of Istanbul by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 – isn’t inspired by a newly-discovered affection for those aspects of Ottoman history that liberal-minded westerners find attractive. Rather, it’s perhaps more realistic to see the phenomenon as fuelled by a deeply-felt desire to regain what is considered to be a lost national glory, power, and prestige. It’s naive to think that Turkey has become less nationalistic in recent years; the only change has been in the nature and context of this nationalism. My impression is that the country’s increased international assertiveness and breakneck economic development have only diverted some of the less savoury impulses of Turkish nationalism from their more traditional spheres; the cracks have merely been papered over.
A more pragmatic amerikan by the name of Don Rich (no not the C&W singer he’s long dead) who I’ve googled to no avail put a piece titled Neo-Ottomanism and American Interests in the Middle East up on his blog back in June, here’s a taste of his pov :
There are Islamists and then there are Islamists some will argue as to Realpolitik, athough that could be the worst naivete of all in the long run, unless you remember that in international relations, friends can become enemies, and vice versa.
Turkey isn’t the Kemalist state we took for granted gradually after the Cold War, and whom we almost broke with over Iraq in 2003 (because of the Kurds), although its still an important American ally, partly for managing Russian power not only in the Middle East, but in the Caucasus and beyond.
All the “Stans” speak a Turkish language, save for the Tajiks.
If the “Stans” underwent a heavy process of Russification, and geography and lock-in effect of Soviet infrastructure limit the ability of outside powers to wield influence there at the pure expense of Russia, at the same time the “Stans” look for outsiders to balance Russia, in which Turkey is useful to American interests in that regard as to preserving Western derived influences, if one must also be realistic about the meaning of Neo-Ottomanism.
I realise that many contemporary MoA-ites devote themselves to the study of the minutiae of fukusi outrages, it is important to pull back and consider ‘the big picture’ now and again. If Ottoman redux is the fukusi strategy it seems to me that this may go a long way towards resolving things that have been taken as inconsistencies in the involvement of Turkey across the ME obviously with Syria but also with israel and Libya.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 12 2012 1:26 utc | 59
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