A Quisling Turkey – Forbes.com
A Quisling Turkey – Forbes.com.
Claudia Rosett, 05.21.10, 12:26 PM EDT
Time to pull Ankara’s license as a regional broker.
Beware. With stunts such as this week’s bid to deflect further sanctions on Iran, Turkey’s leaders like to boast that they are creating a new role for their nation as a rising regional power and broker of peace in the Middle East. What they’re really doing looks more like a throwback to the ways of Vidkun Quisling, a 20th-century Norwegian politician whose collaboration with Nazi Germany earned him a special place in the lexicon. To this day Quisling’s surname is shorthand for a politician willing to sell out his own country to the worst predators, if it looks like that might save his own interests.This is the course on which Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP, is now embarked, as Turkey’s leaders fawn over their nuclear-loving, sanctions-scorning counterparts in the neighboring Islamic Republic of Iran. This past Monday Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, together with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, turned up in Tehran, announcing an amorphous deal for an enriched uranium swap. The aim was clearly to head off new U.N. sanctions on Iran, buying yet more time for Iran’s race toward nuclear weapons. Clasped hands raised with glee, Erdogan, Lula and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stood should-to-shoulder, celebrating this new milestone in nuclear flimflam.
In the ensuing flurry of diplomatic jujitsu, the U.S. on Tuesday presented a new draft sanctions resolution to the U.N. Security Council. With Turkey and Brazil both currently among the 10 rotating members of the Council, and other members such as China, Russia and Lebanon throwing their clinkers into the works, the dustups at Turtle Bay are already under way.
Whatever comes out of the U.N., it is at least clear that it’s time to rethink Turkey’s credentials as a broker. That’s sad to say, because Turkey is a country with tremendous achievements, worthy of respect. Lacking the oil resources that enrich and bedevil much of the Middle East, Turkey’s 74 million people worked hard to turn their country into one of the world’s top 20 most productive economies. For decades Turkey with its secular, Muslim-majority state, was a firm ally of the West, a member since 1952 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a friend to the democratic state of Israel.
Since the Islamic AKP rose to power with a sweeping victory in Turkey’s 2002 elections, its leaders have been trading on Turkey’s credentials to greatly enhance their influence on the world stage. Top Turkish officials have made hundreds of diplomatic forays, globe-trotting to a staggering extent, opening new diplomatic missions in Africa and offering Turkey’s services as a mediator of conflicts in the Middle East.
What’s come of all this? Rather than boosting the standards of world politics, Turkey’s leaders have been lending their country’s good name to a lot of bad things. Since 2005 an Egyptian-born Turk, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, has been secretary-general of the Jeddah-based Organisation of the Islamic Conference. Also in 2005, Turkey together with Spain launched a U.N.-hosted initiative called the Alliance of Civilizations, which was grandfathered out of a previous U.N. oddity called the Dialogue of Civilizations–for which the progenitor was Iran. In 2008 Turkey turned up as go-between for “peace talks” between Syria and Israel, which went bust. These days Turkey has open frictions with Israel and embraces the Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorists of Hamas as “brothers.”
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