GREG SHERIDAN
Suspicious minds in a secular land
March 12, 2005 Weekend Australian
AT Istanbul's gleaming, futuristic international airport, the most heavily stocked novel in the large bookshop is called Metal Firtina (The Metal Storm). Its plot centres on a military invasion of Turkey by the US.
Given that Turkey is a member of NATO and therefore a military ally of the US, this is perplexing, to say the least.
Yet the book has sold more than 150,000 copies. The wave of paranoia sweeping Turkey about the US -- polls show greater opposition to US policy in the Middle East in Turkey than in any other nation - is producing many weird results.
The US ambassador in Ankara, Turkey's capital, had to enlist scientists to help prove that the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day had not been caused by a nuclear explosion conducted jointly by the US and Australia.
On the other hand, senior Turkish politicians and officials say their alliance with the US is absolutely solid. The Turkish military also co-operates intimately with its Israeli counterparts.
The contradictory forces at work in Turkey suggest an underground battle to control this pivotal state in the Middle East. The European Union has at last given Turkey a date - October 3 this year - to begin formal negotiations for Turkish membership of the European Union.
Turkey would transform the EU. With a population of 70 million, it would be second in size only to Germany; and because its birthrate is so much higher than Germany's, it would soon - by 2020 at the latest - become the biggest state in the EU.
Turkey, with about the same population as Egypt, is one of the two largest Muslim states in the Middle East. It is also the only democratic Muslim state in the Middle East, the only one with a substantial Jewish population left and the only one that is a military ally of the US. Indeed Turkey has the second largest army in NATO after the US.
It is governed by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. AKP won office in November 2002. It was a breakaway from an overtly Islamist party. The last time Islamists held power in the 1980s, they were thrown out of office by the military for breaching the strict secularism of Turkey's constitution.
Michael Rubin, editor of the influential US journal Middle East Forum, has recently accused the AKP of receiving huge hidden funding from Saudi Arabia during the past decade.
It is impossible to know the truth of such allegations. But the AKP certainly has extensive Saudi connections. Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul spent years in exile in Saudi Arabia.
Yet Erdogan's Government is energetically pursuing entry into the EU, which is widely seen as cementing a liberal and pro-Western orientation for Turkey. But conspiracy theories are everywhere in the coffee shops of Istanbul and Ankara. One holds that EU membership, with its rules on religious freedom, will allow the Government to free Turkey of the secular norms that have limited the Islamists in the past, such as state control of sermons preached in mosques, state control of religious education and the rules banning women wearing headscarves in government employment or in schools. This, according to the conspiracy theory, would pave the way for Islamisation.
Turkey's secularism is almost unique in the modern world. It is not designed to free religion from the interference of the state but to free the state from the interference of religion.
Istanbul and Ankara look very secular, with their peroxide blondes, raucous media and racy night-life. But out in the countryside, where most Turks live, it's a different story. There, in eastern Anatolia, headscarves are common and honour killings of women are hardly unknown.
In the most devastating novel of Turkish politics, Snow, by Turkey's foremost writer, Orhan Pamuk, published last year and set in the eastern city of Kars, an Islamist worker murders a school principal because he has obeyed the state instruction to refuse admission to girls who wear headscarves.
One pointer to the future might be that middle-class city families typically have one or two children, but rural, more fundamentalist families might have eight or 10 children.
To test all this out I convened an informal focus group of young Turkish professionals in a trendy coffee shop called the New York Bagel Factory, in the up-market waterside Istanbul suburb of Yesilkoy. They were all Muslims, yet all militantly secular, friendly and open young people, all successful in their different walks of life and fiercely nationalist.
Suhan, an English teacher in her 20s, stylish, fashionable and, like all the others in that coffee shop, without a headscarf, is passionate about Turkish politics: "I hate the present Government. OK, the previous governments were corrupt, but I hate the present Government using religion for politics. My religion is between me and God. The Government seems as though it is doing everything very nicely, but what is it really trying to do in the long run? Every time it's trying to change society a bit along its way.
"My mother could wear miniskirts in Istanbul. You can't do that today or people will look at you strangely and make you feel uncomfortable. It's the immigrants from eastern Turkey. They come into Istanbul from the villages and it's like they bring their village life to Istanbul. Thank God we have a good army which protects the Turkish way of life."
Even though Turks overwhelmingly support going into Europe, and these young people are among the most Westernised of Turks, there is also growing bitterness at the endless procrastination and double standards of the Europeans concerning Turkey's proposed membership of the EU. France, for example, will hold a referendum on Turkey's entry into Europe, which is in any event probably 10 years away, yet it has not held referendums on other states joining the EU.
Says Can, a young airline executive with a rakish beard: "I don't believe France, I don't believe Europe. They are liars and hypocrites. Turkey is perfectly dressed already and they say you need a new suit. No matter how many new suits we get, they say you need a new suit. Of course they are racist and prejudiced against us. We don't need Europe."
This nationalism is strong all over Turkey, but there is no comfort in it for the Americans, as Dilara, an earnest academic in her late 20s, makes clear: "We don't like America much at the moment. We don't dislike the American people and we liked America when president [Bill] Clinton came to Turkey after our earthquake.
"But we're not idiots. We can see what [George W. Bush] is doing, killing people, and it's all for oil. We're worried about the way America is attacking countries in the region and we might be on the list. We've always had good relations with Israel but we don't like the way they strap Palestinian children on to their vehicles and tanks."
Just for the record, there is no evidence of Israelis doing anything remotely like this.
Suhan chimes in: "The American people have had their brains washed, of course. And they always do what the Jews tell them to do."
It is important to point out that the Erdogan Government has generally respected Turkey's secularism, although it did mount an abortive effort to make adultery a criminal offence. It has said many times it does not want to transform Turkey into an Islamic state. There is no reason the conspiracy theories about the Erdogan Government should be any more true than the crazy conspiracy theories I hear about the US or Israel. But they are all pulsating through Turkish society.
The real question is whether Turkey's secularism and democracy represent the future of the Middle East or whether in 20 years people will look back on the Istanbul of today as a lost paradise of liberalism.
Soli Ozel, of Bilgi University, does not attend my focus group in the New York Bagel Factory but his analysis of Turkish politics helps explain the focus group's prejudices and complaints.
I meet Ozel in the coffee shop of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, overlooking the Bosporus. Istanbul is such a sensuous and beautiful city, with its Ottomon mosques and palaces, its Byzantine churches and its many synagogues, that you wonder why anyone bothers with politics.
Ozel, a thoughtful Jewish academic who reports he has never suffered any "egregious prejudice", says: "The single most dangerous thing in this country now is the rise of xenophobic, anti-Western nationalism, coming from both nationalists and former leftists who are now like national socialists. This Government doesn't understand this and can't ride this wave. It might be destroyed by it.
"The US destroyed Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq and in the process it destroyed the British-imposed system of Sunni dominance in this region. This is creating a backlash among Sunni Muslims in this country [most Turks are Sunnis], who feel a solidarity for Iraqi Sunnis. Sunni sentiment and nationalism are very related to each other. This Government's conversion to a liberal democratic posture is more a function of political expediency than deep conviction."
Another Bilgi academic, Emre Bogen, also links what he sees as Turkish paranoia to Iraq: "There is growing paranoia in Turkey regarding the US. You hear a kind of primitive, paranoid, anti-American conspiracy everywhere. In Iraq the Turkish people witnessed the scandalous sight that the army of Saddam was only good for fighting civilians.
"Now, something we never say is that most Iraqi people are not keen on fighting the Americans. So you do not even have a good national liberation movement to back against the Americans. So all that is left is paranoia."
Turkey has a long land border with Iraq and will be crucial to its future. The hardheads in the Turkish Government, and especially the military, want the US to succeed in Iraq because US success means a stable Iraq on Turkey's border.
But Turkey's main priority remains preventing the establishment of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq and preventing any support from inside Iraq for Kurdish militancy or terrorism in Turkey.
Western intelligence believes there are Sunni terrorist groups linked to al-Qa'ida active in Turkey, although there has been no repeat of the terrible terrorist bombings in Istanbul, of the British consulate and two synagogues, in November 2003.
Nonetheless, Western sources have great confidence in the Turkish military.
Australia, too, has come to understand Turkey's growing strategic and economic importance (economic growth has boomed in the past two years). It is highly likely that Australia will sign a defence co-operation treaty with Turkey later this year, perhaps when John Howard visits for Anzac Day, which would be one of the few such agreements we have with Muslim countries. This would provide for military co-operation and exchange of officers at staff colleges and the like.
The real battle for Turkey is the battle for Turkish hearts and minds.
The coffee shops of Istanbul and Ankara, and Izmir and Kars, and the vast, fertile farms of Anatolia, through which conflicting, mad conspiracy theories swirl, in competition with more sane and liberal politics, are as much a battleground for the future of democracy and moderate Islam in the Middle East as is the Sunni triangle in Iraq.
And the outcome, perhaps, is almost as uncertain.
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