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Turkey: The sick man of Europe, once again - Spengler
[ATIMES] The Kurdish demographic problem has led Erdogan into a political swamp from which he may not emerge. He won last year’s presidential election by stirring up national ardor against the Kurdish minority, and has kept the Kurdish southeast of the country in a low-level civil war since then. The leader of the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party warned last March that Erdogan had brought ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... to the brink of an ethnic war. To prevent the Syrian Kurds from controlling the northern border of their country and linking up with their Iraqi compatriots, Erdogan covertly supported Sunni terrorists, including ISIS, as Michael Rubin explained last March in Newsweek. Erdogan’s back channel to ISIS blew up in Turkey’s face‐literally‐when ISIS jacket wallahs killed 42 people and injured hundreds at the Istanbul Airport June 29. Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the foundation of the modern state, Turkey’s army acted as the guarantor of the country’s secular state. The Islamist Erdogan attempted to reverse that, jailing hundreds of military officers on a spurious charge of plotting a coup in 2012. Most were released in 2014. Erdogan could not do without the military, however; his failed foreign policy made him dependent on the Turkish army, which reasserted its influence this year. Erdogan proudly called himself a "black Turk," that is, a devout Moslem from the Anatolian hinterland, in contrast to the "White Turks," the Europeanized secular party who came to power under Kemal Ataturk and ruled the country until the 2000s. Turkey’s political crisis stems from profound economic weaknesses, demographic imbalances and confessional, social and ethnic fractures. Whatever emerges from the coup attempt, it will take a great deal more than a change at the top to cure the sick man of Europe. Posted by: Fred 2016-07-17 |
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