Press-Review: Turkey in International Media

Erdoğan attempts to end Turkish isolation with visit Saudi Arabia.

President Erdoğan’s personal style of diplomacy has only fuelled Turkish isolation, writes Daniel Dombey in the Financial Times. This decline in influence, euphemistically described by one of the president’s close advisers as “precious loneliness,” stems from the support of the Muslim Brotherhood and his opposition to Egypt’s president al-Sisi.

Turkey’s diplomatic exclusion is having commercial fallout. Ankara has closed its embassies in Egypt, Syria, Israel and Yemen; the Libyan government is excluding Turkish companies from state contracts and Cairo is to abandon a transportation agreement for Turkish trucks to Africa and the Gulf.

Al-Monitor calls President Erdoğan’s visit to Riyadh an attempt to “test the waters”. Talks with the kingdom’s new monarch, King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud Salman are not believed to have led to concrete breakthroughs given Saudi Arabia’s support of al-Sisi and its condemnation of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organization.
 
Istanbul-based investigative journalist Mehmet Baransu has been detained for defamation.

After a 12-hour lasting search of his home the investigative journalist Mehmet Baransu was arrested on Monday, March 1. The columnist for independent daily Taraf and outspoken critic of the government is charged with founding a criminal organization and divulging official secrets. Yet the secret Baransu revealed was an elaborate coup attempt to overthrow the government.

That leak was pounced upon by the government five years ago and led to the trial of hundreds of military officials in the so-called Sledgehammer conspiracy trial. But much has changed since then. The government is now waging war against the Gülen movement, which once supported its attempts to prosecute the military.

The foreign media puts Baransu’s detention in the context of recent government action against opposition journalists and dissidents in general.
 
Rebel leader Öcalan asks the PKK to lay down their arms.

In an apparent breakthrough to resolve Turkey’s conflict with its Kurdish population, Abdullah Öcalan called on fighters to lay down their arms.  Öcalan himself has been imprisoned on an island south of Istanbul since 1999 but retains sufficient prestige to request the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) which he founded to hold an extraordinary congress in spring in order to end the 30-year-long armed struggle.

Though sceptical about the implementation of the disarmament President Erdoğan welcomed the rebel leader’s call as the consequences of a process initiated in 2012. Still it is not sure if the PKK commanders based in northern Iraq will heed Öcalan’s appeal.
 
Celebrated Kurdish novelist Yaşar Kemal died at the age of 91.

Yaşar Kemal, one of Turkey’s most famous and best-loved authors passed away in Istanbul on the last day of February. Born in 1923 into a Turkish-Kurdish family he grew up in a village in the south of Turkey, a hardscrabble life that formed the backdrop for his colourful tales of peasants who become accidental heroes and the stuff of myth.

Kemal was a great teller of stories praised for his narrative style; his most famous book, Memed, My Hawk – a tale of injustices right and noble outlaws brought him to the attention of the Nobel Prize jury in 1973. However, as the member of the Workers’ Party and an advocate of Kurdish rights the author was in constant trouble with the Turkish state and was arrested for his political activity on more than one occasion.
 
Miss Turkey faces two years of custody for a critical Instagram post about Erdoğan.
Merve Büyüksaraç, Miss Turkey of 2006, could face two years of prison for insulting President Erdoğan in an Instagram post. Last summer the former model shared a poem titled “The Master`s Poem” (“Ustanın Şiiri”) about the accusation of corruption against confidants of then-Prime Minister Erdoğan and his son Bilal. Because of her friends’ warning Büyüksaraç removed the poem, which originally was published in the satire magazine “Uykusuz”.

The model could face a sentence up to two years of prison for insulting a public official. She protested her innocence stating that she just considered the poem as “funny” and didn’t mean to insult Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Since August more than 60 people have been accused of mocking Turkey’s leader. Only recently a 16-year-old student was briefly detained for calling Erdoğan "the thieving owner of the illegal palace” in a speech.
 
With the arrestment of 40 police officers, the Erdoğan-Gülen feud goes on.

In raids carried out in 19 Turkish cities, some 40 police officers were detained on 25 February. The policemen and -women are charged with participating in a plot devised by Fethullah Gülen, an exiled Muslim preacher and former ally of President Erdoğan.

The detentions are the latest events in a series of acts to purge the police and judiciary of the followers of Gülen’s “Hizmet”-movement, referred to as Gülenists. The Turkish president accuses the cleric and his followers of building a “parallel” state within a state” in order to overthrow the government. On the day before the raids, the Istanbul Public Prosecutor’s Office issued a second arrest warrant for Gülen, accusing him of being member of a terrorist organization.

Erdoğan and Gülen entered into what the Daily Telegraph describes as marriage of convenience in 2003, helping onwards helping each other realise their ambition. That arrangement was to break down in 2013 with the discovery of bugs in Erdoğan’s office and police anti-corruption raids against key government supporters. Since then, the government has been fighting back.
 
New Austrian “Law on Islam” may prohibit Turkey from sending “official” imams

Austria plans to adopt a new law regulating the rights and duties of Austrian Muslims in the attempt to establish an “Austrian-style Islam”. One of the main amendments to a law of 1912 that codified Islam as official religion in Austria is the prohibition of continuous foreign funding for Muslim organisations and mosques. This will affect the Diyanet’s (Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs) ability to appoint and provide salaries for Turkish Imams in the country. Turkey’s head of religious affairs, Mehmet Görmez, criticised the new law as “a step backwards in 100 years of religious freedom.”

Following Austria’s lead, politicians of the Christian party (CDU) called for a similar law in Germany to stop “imported imams”. According to those making the call, an imam sent from Turkey, who doesn’t know the culture and language of his host country, hinders integration and interfaith dialogue and drives young Muslims into the arms of German-speaking radical preachers. Islamic scholars educated at German universities would enhance the dialogue with Muslim communities, they argue.

Tags: mehmet baransu, öcalan, president erdogan, yasar kemal