A "C" That Made Turkey Happy!
AIM Athens, December 31, 1999
On 10 December, Turkey got the "C" it had for so long been chasing and hardly any of its citizens were unhappy about it. Because the "C" here reflected not a grade but the status of candidate to the European Union. This candidacy, coded in Ankara and Istanbul as the "C" word, had been refused to Turkey two years ago although things in that country were no worse than today. But, in the Luxembourg EU summit of 1997, the Europeans gave the impression that they did not want a country with a majority of Muslims to be considered as a potential member. Certainly, they were claiming that Turkey's human rights and democracy records were poor: but they were hardly better this year when, in the EU's Helsinki summit, Turkey's aspirations to candidacy status were acknowledged. While some other countries granted in 1997 the "C" had at that time almost as bad records as Turkey on these issues: Slovakia was one of them.
What made this change of EU attitude towards Turkey possible this year, at least according to the Turks themselves, was last year's change of government in Germany and, especially, the new Greek foreign policy. "George Papandreou must get a Nobel Peace Prize for that" said a leading civil society activist in Istanbul soon after the decision was announced. Without changing its position on any of its many problems with Turkey, Greece had decided that the best way to handle them was not in a perpetual climate of hostility, but through an aggressive effort to reconcile the two sides, and build confidence through meetings and agreements on secondary issues.
Tragic as it may sound, this approach was greatly facilitated by the consecutive earthquakes that devastated major areas near Athens and Istanbul: the relief efforts of each country towards the other, played up by the media, shattered the myth that there were irreconcilable differences between the average Turk and the average Greek, just like between the average Arab and the average Israeli in the Middle East. With the usual emotional exaggeration found among Mediterranean peoples, Turks and Greeks showed a lot of sympathy and compassion towards each other, making any politicians' insistence on creating new or exaggerating old problems irrational. It was an amazing turn of events, if one remembers that, in the first quarter of 1999, the two countries had reached a new low in the bilateral relations following the revelation that Turkey's "most wanted terrorist," Abdullah Ocalan, was hiding in the Greek Embassy in Kenya before being abducted by Turkish agents and brought to face trial in Turkey.
Certainly, the EU decision was balanced enough not to allow the Turkish government to claim victory and to provide the Greek government with the means to overcome persistent domestic accusations of having "sold out" the country's interests. For a brief moment, in fact, it seemed that that balancing act may had failed, as, for a dozen hours, the Turkish government appeared wavering as to whether accept or reject the EU offer. The latter's appended conditions were that Turkey must make substantial progress towards a real state of law devoid of undue influence of the army, and towards the respect of human rights. Plus either contribute to a settlement in Cyprus or accept that the latter will join the EU divided, without the Turkish-controlled North. These terms were difficult to swallow by any Turkish government and it took an emergency visit of the EU's new foreign policy czar, Javier Solana, and a diplomatically ambiguous letter of the Finn Presidency for the Ecevit government's eventual consent. These twelve hours of negotiations were a time of high anxiety for civil society and minorities in Turkey: they had all hoped that a Turkish candidacy would strengthen their advocacy for the respect of human and minority rights. So, many were in the brink of crying while it seemed that Turkey may shut the EU door closed forever. Relief was evident when they all woke up to a "yes" on 11 December.
"The last time Turkey was proclaimed European" said a leading member of the Greek community in Istanbul, "was after the Crimean Wars. That was followed by the first effort to create a state of law, which was very beneficial to the minority communities, including to the Patriarchate. We wished we had today the same guarantees that were provided then to us." "The human rights record of Turkey deteriorated after 1997 and our advocacy efforts became much more difficult after that," had already declared a Human Rights Association activist in Athens a fortnight before the EU summit; this is why "we favor the granting of the status of candidacy to Turkey." During the EU summit, Kurds demonstrated in Helsinki in favor of the Turkish candidacy as a means to help solve the Kurdish conflict. While, two days after the Helsinki decision, the not so European-oriented Islamists marched in Istanbul asking that their country implements the EU-mandated human rights norms and allows the Muslim women to wear the veil. Finally, it was reported that even the Turkish generals favored the road to the EU, as they feared the Turkish armed forces may be excluded from the emerging European military structures if Turkey were to stay out of Europe.
That "C" made therefore almost all sectors of Turkish society happy. It will take a great effort though for most of them to adapt to the prerequisites for transforming the candidacy to a substantial negotiation for accession. Turkey should in fact shed the authoritarian, unitarian and intolerantly secular character of the state in favor of a democratic and multicultural state respectful of religious pluralism. France, with all its present weaknesses, may serve here as an example. Its Jacobin foundations had indeed been the inspiration for the founders of the Kemalist state. The Turkish state's obsession with the alleged threats to the Republic emanating from the fervent Muslims strongly resembles the attitude of the nineteenth century French republican state towards the -perceived then as- "counter-revolutionary" Catholic Church. Surely enough, modern Turkey Islam is not very democratic, but neither was last century Catholicism. Just as the latter adapted to the requirements of a pluralist secular state, Turks must work towards the democratization of Islam rather than seek -always fruitless- ways to repress it.
Likewise for the Kurds. Their groups -PKK and others- are as undemocratic as most Turks were half a century ago. Their continuing repression, however, is a sure way to make them even more intolerant. On the contrary, now that PKK activity has rescinded, Turkey needs to commute the death sentence of Ocalan and make bold moves towards the Kurds to make their integration in the Turkish state possible. "Turkey's way to the EU passes through Diyarbekir" was the late December accurate assessment of presidential hopeful and former prime minister Mesut Yilmaz.
Indicative of the changing climate is the fact that a film like "Salkim Hanimin Taneleri" (Salkim Hanim's Necklace) is not banned but instead breaks audience records in Turkey. Based on a book by a mainstreamer, Motherland Party (ANAP) Deputy Yilmaz Karakoyunlu, it depicts the deliberate efforts to Turkify the country's population during the Second World War, through the imposition of a Wealth Tax levied disproportionally at the expense of the urban "religious" minorities of Istanbul -Greeks, Armenians and Jews. It has fueled an unprecedented public debate on that mischief of the past, including a four-hour long televised debate on NTV. Two years ago, such efforts would have led all instigators to prison.
These officially recognized minorities, numbering less than 100,000 members today, have been suffering a lot since the wartime period and have been living in constant fear. It is high time Turkey treats them correctly as a first sign that it wants to respect and enhance the cultures, rather than barely tolerate the presence, of the ethnically non-Turkish populations in its territory. Indeed, in the closing days of 1999, Turkish authorities pleasantly surprised the Patriarchate of Constantinople, when they revoked the license for a "millenium" ceremony to be held in what is today a museum but had many centuries ago been the Patriarchical church of St Irene.
Such moves are duly appreciated also on the other side of the border with Greece, where the Helsinki decision was perceived as a major achievement of the new Greek foreign policy: in fact, Turkey's wavering before accepting it enhanced the impression of a major Greek achievement. The immediate result was an apparent reversal of fortune for the socialist government, which made the conservative opposition drop its efforts to force an immediate election. The latter's leader, Costas Karamanlis, had previously implied that his party would not vote for the renewal of the presidential term of Costas Stefanopoulos (already backed by the socialists) so as to force early parliamentary elections. After the Helsinki summit, however, Karamanlis announced his party's support for Stefanopoulos, to avoid an apparently certain defeat of his party in an early poll. The Greek-Turkish rapprochement is now accelerated, and foreign minister visits are announced for January in Turkey and February in Greece. "Miracles" that a mere "C" can produce!
Panayote Elias Dimitras