Monday, August 30, 2010

11:51 am, Bozeman time

These are busy times, of course, as today is the first day of school. Since I'm teaching Tuesday-Thursdays this semester, I don't start until tomorrow.

It's good to be back in Bozeman. Summer was fun—as readers of this blog know, I did a lot of traveling—but it's nice to no longer be moving around all the time. Home is where the record collection is, as they say...

Since I've been back I've been riding my bike a lot, as usual. Getting re-acclimated to the high altitude here took a couple of days, but I'm no longer desperately sucking wind while I ride.

I've also been working a lot. While I did a lot of writing this summer, it's a lot easier to do this kind of work when you're sitting in just one place and all of your books are nearby.

For now, though, I've got to finish getting ready for tomorrow and the semester ahead. On  a dreary, drizzly day like this one, I guess that's a good enough thing to be doing.  
 

Anyway, here is your N & P.....

Today is the Zafer Bayrami, or Victory Holiday, in Turkey. This day commemorates the victory of Mustafa Kemal's nationalist forces over the Greek Army in their three-year war (1919-1922) in the aftermath of WWI. For Turkey, this marked the end of a decade of conflict which had begun with the first Balkan War in 1912. Approximately one-fifth of the pre-war population of the Ottoman Empire died over the course of this decade.

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Zaman is reporting that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan plans to introduce a new constitution in 2011 if the AK Party remains in power after elections that need to be called within the next year.  

Currently, people in Turkey are debating a constitutional package proposed by the AK Party that will be voted on in a referendum on September 12. Among other things, the constitutional package includes provisions allowing the government to appoint several new judges and prosecutors—a judge-packing scheme not unlike that tried by FDR in the 1930s.

Most analysts expect that the September 12 reform package will pass easily. As for introducing an entire new constitution, that will depend on what happens politically in Turkey over the next year.

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This September the parliament in the Republic of Georgia is also considering constitutional changes which would strengthen the position of the Prime Minister at the expense of the President. Many people have speculated that the rationale behind this change is to keep Georgian President Saakashvili in a position of power (as PM) after he is forced (by term limits) to resign the presidency in 2013.

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Isik Kosaner has become the new chief of the general staff of Turkey's military, a position he was appointed to earlier this month. If you're interested, here is his wikipedia bio.


Isik Kosaner ("Ishik Koshaner")

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Retreating from the G-word: Iranian Vice-President Hamid Baghaei is denying claims that he recognized the Armenian genocide in comments he made at a conference in Tehran last week. The comments had created considerable uproar in the Turkish media, with the Iranian Embassy in Ankara making a statement immediately thereafter denying that there had been any change in Iran towards the issue of the Armenian genocide.

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Ahead of a planned trip to Athens this fall, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has expressed hope that Greece and Turkey can work together to end conflicts between Turkish and Greek pilots over the Aegean Sea.

The AKP's efforts to develop better relations with Greece falls in line with similar endeavors taking place vis-a-vis a number of other neighboring countries, including Russia, Iran, Armenia, Serbia, and Syria.

A number of analysts have discussed Turkey's foreign policy under the AKP in terms of "neo-Ottomanism" or "a turn to the east," characterizations which I have criticized elsewhere. Ultimately, Erdogan's government is interested in establishing good neighbor relations, and this objective is particularly important in the east—where Iran, Syria, and Iraq share borders with Turkey in a region populated in large part by Kurds. The Erdogan government sees that its "Kurdish initiative" has failed and is now increasingly using a military solution to the PKK with the cooperation of its neighbors.

This is Turkey's vaunted "turn to the east." So I guess they'll call Erdogan's efforts to improve relations with Athens another example of "neo-Ottomanism" in recognition of Greece's Ottoman legacy?

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On the subject of Turkey's relations with its neighbors, here's an article from a the Turkish Daily News discussing American efforts to lessen Turkish-Israeli tensions.

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The Jamestown spooks discuss what they present as Moscow's efforts to gain influence in Moldova. Given the Jamestown Foundation's history of CIA financing and the generally anti-Moscow tone to a lot of its articles, it's important to take Jamestown with a grain of salt. While their site is informative, it also tends to run a lot of articles emphasizing non-Russian "national" resistance to Moscow and the nefarious acts of the Russian government in its dealings with the "near abroad."
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The traveling party of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed President of Chechnya, was attacked this weekend while Kadyrov was visiting his home village of Tsentoroi, about 20 miles east of the Chechen capital Grozny. At least 14 people were killed in the attack including, according to Kadyrov, two of his own security personnel.

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Crimean Tatars held a Kurultay, or national congress, this weekend to discuss what they have described as a dangerous turn in the status of Tatar community rights in the Crimea.

At the heart of the issue is who, if anyone, should have the responsibility for articulating Crimean Tatar community interests in communications with Ukrainian officials. The Crimean Tatar political leadership—the folks who held the Kurultay this weekend—have their own parliament, or Mejlis, which does not hold any administrative power but which does serve as a soapbox for defining the views of the Crimean Tatar community with respect to political issues facing the Crimea.

Much of the current problem has to do with the relations between the Mejlis and Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. You might remember Yanukovich as the "bad guy" during the Orange revolution of 2005, when his initial victory (backed by Moscow) was overturned in a popular-and possibly CIA-supported—revolt against very questionable looking election results. A new round of elections was held, and Viktor Yushchenko (who was supported by the Bush administration) won.

Yushchenko ended up being extremely unpopular, and this year Yanukovych was elected. Crimean Tatars, and especially the leadership which runs the Mejlis, have traditionally supported Ukrainian nationalist parties—parties like that of Yushchenko, which are also in favor of NATO membership and western integration, and are therefore also supported by American governments.

Since Yanukovych was elected in April, he has sought to establish connections with Crimean Tatars from outside the Mejlis. Earlier this August, Mejlis leaders refused to participate in meetings with Yanukovych because non-Mejlis Tatars were also taking part. 

In some ways, this issue reminds me of the research I do regarding late imperial Russia. Back then Muslims were largely administered by Muslim spiritual assemblies, the leaders of which were appointed by government officials. After the Revolution of 1905 and the emergence of mass politics in the Russian Empire, Muslims set up a political party, known as Ittifak, which they used as part of an effort to gain influence over the formulation of state policy relating to Muslim communities in the empire.

But as is the case today, the question of representation was an issue back then. I don't really know the manner in which the members of the Mejlis are elected—perhaps everything is very transparent and inclusive—but in the case of Ittifak in 1905, the main problem was that the folks speaking in the name of the community often had an agenda that was far different from that of many of the people they were purporting to represent.

So how representative is the Crimean Tatar Mejlis? Can anyone fill me in?

According to one mailing I received on Monday morning, the Kurultay decided to "refuse from the participation at the Council of Representative of Crimean Tatar people of President of Ukraine," the council to which Yanukovych was trying to appoint non-Mejlis Tatars. In a statement that the Mejlis released this morning, however, there is no mention of refusing to take part in the council.