Monday, December 6, 2010 

The snow has been falling pretty heavy on the Borderlands Lodge lately, and on Friday I went skiing for the first time this season. Our local ski hill, Bridger Bowl, opened for business during Thanksgiving break, and now is available for skiing every day.

It was a bit of a slog at first—I hadn't skied since late March and my first run was very, very powdery. We'd had eight inches the night before and the hills hadn't been groomed since. But after taking a couple of easier runs to get my balance back, I returned pretty quickly to my (mediocre) form of last spring.

Unfortunately, my camera hadn't yet arrived in the mail so I wasn't able to take any pictures. Hopefully this screengrab of Activision's Atari-based skiing video game from the early 1980s will nevertheless give you a pretty good idea of what the conditions were like.

 

As you can see, it was a pretty good day out on the hill. Not only did I manage to avoid hitting all three trees, but also made it safely past the little grey patch en route to skiing in between the two purple flags in record time.

Real trouble only began when I crashed into the Activision logo at the bottom of the hill.

People—here's a little Turkey N & P:
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As far as I'm concerned, the biggest story I've heard so far re Turkey and the Wikileaks dump relates to claims that US authorities have provided assistance to the PKK.

For some reason, almost all of the stories about this are paired with a second story, much less convincing, about alleged "Turkish support for al-Qaeda."

But the symmetry is very debatable: the reports about American actions, if they prove accurate, indicate that American government officials were supporting PKK members, while the story about Turkey is that the Turkish government failed to secure its borders from al-Qaeda sympathizers.

Well, the Turkish government isn't able to secure its borders from the PKK, either, but that doesn't mean the Turkish government is supporting Kurdish separatism (although some people would argue that there are probably moles/provacateurs within the state).
 
In any case, I'd like to hear more about US-PKK connections. And I'd also like to know why these two stories—one seemingly quite a bit more concrete than the other—have been paired in this way.

Hopefully we'll see what's going on once the cables are released.

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Ha-ha: According to the Hurriyet Daily News, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan—who has sued numerous journalists and cartoonists whose work he has considered "slander"— has now threatened to sue American diplomats whose comments on Erdogan's alleged corruption were released in the Wikileaks dump.

Sez Erdogan, in the Hurriyet piece: “This is the United States’ problem, not ours... Those who have slandered us will be crushed under these claims, will be finished and will disappear.”


By all appearances, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan isn't happy about the dump Wikileaks took in front of him

So he was just talking about suing them, right?

According to Hurriyet, the Prime Minister also brought up the story of a journalist who had claimed Erdogan had put over $1 billion into a foreign bank account. Tuncay Ozkan, the founder of the TV news station KanalTurk, has now been in prison for over two years as part of the supposed "coup-plot" against the AKP.

The WikiLeaks release is not the first time he has been made the subject of such slanders, Erdoğan said, noting that a journalist who claimed the prime minister had $1 billion in personal assets was now in prison as a suspect in the ongoing Ergenekon case. The journalist Erdoğan referred to is Tuncay Özkan, who has been in prison for the last two years without being convicted. Ergenekon is the name of an alleged gang accused of plotting to overthrow the government in 2003 and 2004.

“One billion dollars... That is more than the budget of the Istanbul municipality at that time,” Erdoğan said. “And now this gentleman is in [prison]. There are still media [outlets] and columnists following the same path.”

So, message to American diplomats: don't say anything bad about R. Tayyip Erdogan, because if you do he will sue you and/or put you in prison. And if that doesn't work, he'll just take a wikileak on the side of the American Embassy in Ankara.
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Radikal reports (in Turkish) on a 14 year-old boy who claimed he was physically assaulted by Erdogan after the boy heckled him at a rally.

The kid, who is referred to only by his initials in the article, says that after he heckled the Prime Minister, Erdogan called him over, asked him why he was saying what he was saying, then grabbed him by the neck, scratching the kid with his fingernails.

The kid's family hired a lawyer and took their case to the prosecutor, where it was dismissed.

But now, according to Radikal, the boy is now on trial facing up to two years in prison on the charge of insulting a state official.


All scratched up and ready for prison
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Groan: Kamil Pasha posts an "excellent article" in Foreign Policy by Aliza Marcus. Marcus' argument is that Erdogan is "building up" democracy in Turkey, and as proof compares the current situation in Turkey with the repression and violence of military rule in the early 1980s.

American-based commentators like Marcus, with their focus on freedom of religious expression, tend to like Erdogan and his civilian government and are rightfully suspicious of the Turkish military. Indeed, the early 1980s were a time of incredible state-based violence against Turkish citizens, and this violence has never really stopped.

But why is Marcus so opposed to people criticizing the AKP? Writes Marcus:

[Anti-AKP critics] portray Erdogan as a power-hungry Islamic radical intent on turning Turkey into an authoritarian, fundamentalist state. They claim that the government has concocted an "elaborate political fiction" that the Turkish armed forces planned a coup in a plot dubbed "Ergenekon." The arrest of some 60 military officers and civilian supporters for allegedly planning this coup, they say, was done solely to harass and stifle their opponents. Allegedly, the evidence against the military officers and civilian backers has been fabricated, creating a "climate of fear" for secular Turks.

As I've mentioned before, the trouble with being a critic of the AKP is that the only people who seem to agree with me are neo-cons who are convinced that the AKP wants to create a new Islamic caliphate (a ridiculous idea that Nicholas Birch seems to take seriously at Eurasianet.org).

But is moving on from a system in which the military regularly intervenes in politics to one dominated by an authoritarian political party really progress?

I mean, at least the military has intervened at different times in opposition to different understandings of "threat." The coup in 1960 had different origins and different results from the intervention in 1971 and, especially, from the military takeover in 1980. The intervention of 1997 was likewise motivated by different understandings of 'threat' and had different results.

And that's been an obstacle, of course, to removing the military from politics in Turkey: far too many people, on both the left and the right (and now secularists, too) have their favorite intervention: a "good" intervention that left things better than before, as opposed to the "bad" interventions that just messed things up even more.

But back to the AKP and this article...

To a large extent, I can understand the AKP's use of the Ergenekon trial. After all, Erdogan and friends are just fighting fire with fire. It's no coincidence, I think, that the Ergenekon trial was transformed from an investigation into state crimes against Turkish civilians into a round-up of anti-AKP "coup-plotters" at the same time that the AKP was at risk of being closed (in 2008) for having supposedly violated the Turkey's secular nature. Erdogan and friends survived the court ruling by the skin of their teeth. They know what happened to Erbakan, Menderes, and others. Rather than sit quietly and await their fate, they took the offensive: Ergenekon.

You don't have to be an expert on Turkey to see this connection, and you don't have to be a supporter of the Turkish military to realize that the Ergenekon narrative pushed by the AKP (and passed on by a cast of sympathetic and/or lazy foreign observers) is absurd.

But why the zero-sum game? Why are "anti-AKP critics" somehow considered supporters of military rule?

I don't consider Erdogan the devil incarnate, and I certainly don't consider him an Islamic radical. But I do think there is an enormous amount of evidence demonstrating that Erdogan himself and his government are very intolerant of dissenting voices, have employed the state apparatus as a means of silencing critics, and have used the Ergenekon trial as a means of conducting a private war with perceived enemies in the military, the press, and civil society. Look at just about any post labeled "Turkey" or "Ergenekon trial" that has appeared in this blog for the last two years and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Is it not possible that both the military and the AKP could have serious issues with democracy, rule of law, and constitutionalism? Why do foreigners covering Turkey always have to look for the folks in the white hat?

Jenny White, Kamil Pasha's alter ego, generally doesn't comment much on the articles she posts on Kamil Pasha—that's her style. She finds something, provides a brief introduction, puts it up, and then her readers often come up with a really great discussion from which one can learn a lot about both Turkish and non-Turkish attitudes towards Turkey. And that's cool—it's kind of like a nineteenth century salon, where a topic is provided for the gathering chatterers to discuss without the host/hostess getting too involved in the presentation.

But at the same time, I guess I find it a bit annoying when rubbish like this is given a stamp of approval ("excellent!") by someone recognized as an expert on Turkey. This article is basically telling AKP critics to shut up because things were worse during a period of military rule. Is that the message Turkey experts in American academia really need to be spreading, let alone endorsing?


Not so excellent

I mean, even if people don't feel any sympathy for the people who have been detained, rightly or wrongly (there's a mix of both, I suspect), in the Ergenekon trial, what about the alleged victims of state-sponsored death squads whose cases were finally supposed to brought to light by this trial prior to its transformation into political theatre? Don't these people have a right to have their cases heard? They've dropped off the map entirely. And shouldn't people who know better be trying to poke holes in this farcical narrative, rather than endorsing arguments which only seem to be saying "shut up—it was worse between 1980 and 1983?"
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Thanks for the information: Yigal Schleifer discusses all the dirty gossip in the Wikileaks dump on Istanbul Calling, then tells us there's nothing interesting in it.

On the Turkey front, at least, despite the advance hype, there was little earth shattering material in the leaked cables. After taking a look at what was released so far, the Hurriyet Daily News was able to come up with this vapid observation: "U.S. diplomats in Turkey have been deeply interested in the politics of the country, according to United States State Department cables made public by whistleblower site WikiLeaks."

Here, by the way, are the cables tagged "Turkey" in the latest dump. Try not to get your fingers too dirty.
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I hope you enjoyed your N & P!