The balkans - can turkey long abide erdogan

[shock]

THE BALKANS - CAN TURKEY LONG ABIDE ERDOGAN?



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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s proclamation last week that Bosnia-Herzegovina is now in the “care” of his country generated much public controversy in the Balkan states of Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.

“Bosnia and Herzegovina is entrusted to us,” Erdogan told a meeting of the provincial heads of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara last week.

He recalled a statement made by the former Alija Izetbegovic, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first president, when Erdogan visited him on his deathbed in 2003. “He (Izetbegovic) whispered in my ear these phrases: ‘Bosnia (and Herzegovina) is entrusted to you (Turkey). These places are what remain of the Ottoman Empire’,” he said.

Izetbegovic, who led Bosnia into the war of independence in 1992 and subsequently became the country’s first president, died of a heart disease in 2003.

The thought of being passed off as a ‘trust’ to any country is enough to spark intense opposition but the statement is made worse by the fact that Bosnia is home to a highly diverse population comprising various ethno-religious communities including Bosniak Muslims, Catholic Bosnian Croats and Orthodox Serbs as well.

The latter two groups make up more than half of Bosnia’s population of four million. For them, the 500 years of Turkish-Ottoman rule that ended only with the collapse of the empire at the end of World War I are remembered almost exclusively as a period of severe oppression.


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Incompetency and insanity

are two different things.

Erdogan, however, has mastered both.

 

[waltky]

Granny thinks he looks like a self-important scowlin' bulldog...

Erdogan the Magnificent, Turkey's Neo-Ottoman Revival
13 Mar 2018 - In 1994, an aspiring Turkish politician named Recep Tayyip Erdogan leveraged his fame as a player for Istanbul's Kasimpasa Soccer Club into a successful run for mayor of Istanbul as a candidate of the Islamist Welfare Party.

His initial success proved short-lived. In 1998, he was dismissed from his position as mayor, banned from further political office and imprisoned for four months for having recited a poem, during a speech, that promoted an Islamic point of view of the role of government. Erdogan later abandoned his explicitly Islamist views and recast himself as a socially conservative democrat who espoused liberal economic policies. In 2001, along with a former ally Fethullah Gülen, he founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to reflect his newfound objectives of social conservatism and economic reform. In 2003, following the removal of the ban and his reinstatement in Turkish politics after the electoral success of the AKP in the 2002 elections brought it to power, he was elected to the Turkish Parliament in a by-election in Siirt. That victory heralded the rise of Erdogan into the highest reaches of Turkish politics. He became, in turn, prime minister from March 2003, until he was elected president of Turkey in 2014. He has continued in that role through the present day.

Initially, the AKP-dominated parliament stayed true to its program of political and economic reform. In 2004, it passed a series of five reform packages designed to bring Turkey in line with European Union practices. These reforms included, among other things, increased legal protections of social, cultural and political rights, as well as protecting freedom of expression and limiting the role of the military in Turkish politics. Over the last 10 years however, Erdogan and the AKP have veered significantly from their initial reformist agenda. Erdogan has been criticized for being increasingly authoritarian and for orchestrating changes in the Turkish constitution designed to further concentrate political authority in the presidency. Turkey's external policy, in the meantime, has grown increasingly nationalistic and antagonistic to American and NATO objectives in the Middle East. Ankara's policies in the Syrian civil war, its support of radical Islamist groups and its intervention against the U.S.-supported Syrian Democratic Forces, has led to significant tensions in its relationship with Washington.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan​

Domestically, the AKP has supported the reintroduction of many Islamic cultural practices. These have ranged from promoting the use of the veil by Turkish women to a radical expansion of government-funded religious schools. In addition, the AKP has promoted the glorification of Turkey's Ottoman heritage. It has, for example, adopted Ottoman ceremonial dress for Turkish troops providing honor guards for visiting dignitaries. It has encouraged Ottoman-themed television programs. It has also promoted the revival of traditional Ottoman military band music -- termed Janissary music. The Janissaries were an elite Praetorian guard charged with protecting Ottoman sultans. Recently, Ankara announced that Turkish schools would begin teaching the Turkish language using its historic Arabic script. It later modified the policy, after it was heavily criticized, to say that instruction would be optional and not mandatory as originally announced.

Finally, most significantly for Turkey's neighbors, Erdogan has raised questions about the legitimacy of the postwar treaties signed by Turkey after World War I, which established its present borders. He has claimed, for example, that Mosul, Kirkuk and portions of northern Iraq, covering much of what is now Iraqi Kurdistan, were seized illegally by the British at the end of World War I and should be returned to Turkish sovereignty. Similar claims have been made for the Dodecanese Islands, currently controlled by Greece, and for portions of the Turkish-Syrian borderlands. Ankara's domestic and foreign policies have been described by some critics as a revival of Ottoman values and policies. Termed "neo-Ottomanism," it is defined as a political ideology that promotes greater political engagement of Turkey with regions formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire. This engagement manifests itself as Ankara's promotion of its role in protecting ethnic Turkic inhabitants of the former Ottoman domains, as well as being a champion of Sunni interests.

In addition, it manifests itself in promoting a revival of Ottoman traditions and culture, including its Islamic religious heritage, among Turks both within Turkey and among the ethnic Turks living outside the country. The latter includes both the historic ethnic Turkic communities in the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as the Turkish immigrant communities throughout Western Europe. What exactly does Erdogan's and the AKP's neo-Ottomanism signify? Is this the beginning of a reversal of the Kemalist revolution orchestrated by Kemal Ataturk when the modern Turkish Republic was founded or political expediency on the part of Erdogan and his followers?

The Roots of Neo-Ottomanism