turkey Archive
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How Turkey’s Islamists fell out of love with Iran
”Iran’s rapid fall from grace with Turkish Islamists is one of the most important recent structural shifts in the Middle East. Such a break is far from marginal and yields several important points for consideration. This shift validates the Ataturk- Pahlavi example, which shows that détente in Turkish-Iranian relations can only happen when both [...] -
Turkey’s ‘Free Syrian Army’ Troubles
September 6, 2012 by H.A. Unver http://fikraforum.org/?p=2644 On August 20, a car bomb went off in the southern Turkish province of Gaziantep on the Syrian border, killing 9 civilians, including 4 children. The Turkish government blamed the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group on the U.S. Department of State’s foreign terrorist organizations list, for [...] -
Turkey’s “Deep-State” and the Ergenekon Conundrum
“Ergenekon” is the name given to arguably the most important legal process in Turkish history in which around 100 suspects are charged with aiming to topple the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) through a military coup. The legal indictment infers that these suspects are in fact a part of a wider network of individuals [...] -
Evolved Islamists versus unevolved secularists
The secularist camp in Turkey has never functioned under the threat and restrictions of the military, judiciary or academia. Thus it was never forced to evolve, change and improve http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/h.php?news=evolved-islamists-versus-unevolved-secularists-2008-07-22 Tuesday, July 22, 2008 It is becoming increasingly popular to view Turkey as a country that suffers from multiple-personality disorder. The “two Turkeys” analogy, frequently [...] -
Will the Turkish Constitutional Court Ban the AKP?
On March 14, Turkey’s chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, filed a case with the country’s Constitutional Court asking it to shut down the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and ban seventy-one of its members from seeking elected office for five years. He accused the party of spearheading “anti-secular activities” in violation of the Turkish constitution. [...] -
Post-PKK Operations: Will Turkey Change Its Attitude toward Iran and Syria?
Since the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, the absence of U.S. action toward the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) presence in northern Iraq has been driving a wedge between Turkey and the United States. Meanwhile, Turkey’s ties with Iran and Syria, which analysts characterized as “cold if occasionally cordial” in the 1990s, have [...] -
Iraqi Kurds and the Turkish-Iraqi Memorandum against the PKK
On August 7, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in Ankara against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Although the PKK, based in northern Iraq, is on the U.S. State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, lack of action against the group by Washington [...] -
Cabinet, President, Referendum: Turkey’s Complex Political Calendar
The new parliament’s first order of business will be securing a vote of confidence for the AKP’s new cabinet. Then the legislature will face the constitutional mandate of electing a new president, an executive post with important prerogatives such as appointing judges to the secular constitutional court. But while the Turkish parliament prepares to elect [...] -
July 2007 Turkish Elections: Winners and Fault Lines
In the wake of a May 2007 presidential election crisis and subsequent political stalemate — punctuated by massive public rallies and intervention by both the judiciary and the military — Turkey called for early parliamentary elections to be held in July 2007. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which consolidated its hold on various [...]
