Helena – Page 20 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Robinson and Brahimi: Wrong on Hamas and women

Mary Robinson and Lakhdar Brahimi have a piece in HuffPo today in which they argue, probably correctly, that it is Gaza’s women and children who are paying the highest price for Israel’s now years-long siege of Gaza.
They write:

Women in this conservative society find their domestic responsibilities made all the more difficult and time-consuming by the blockade — and they bear the brunt of society’s frustration and anger in such trying times.

But they immediately go on to add this:

Equally disturbing are the creeping restrictions on women’s freedom imposed by Hamas activists.

Equally disturbing??? That is, they are claiming that Hamas is just as culpable as the Israel of the crime of oppression of women??
Their evidence?
They cite allegedly Hamas-led “initiatives” to harrass schoolgirls not wearing headscarves (and leave the impression that this applies to even the youngest schoolgirls.) They write,

Women are punished if they smoke in public, while their male compatriots are allowed to do so. And at the beach, Gaza’s main source of fun and entertainment, women and men are strictly segregated.

And then, this amazing untruth:

The erosion of women’s freedoms is compounded by their lack of participation in politics.

And then they refer to an alleged “absence of women from politics.”
This last claim is simply untrue. Hamas has at least four women MPs on its roster, at least two of whom live in Gaza. One of them is the smart and dedicated Jamila Shanty, whom I interviewed in 2006.
Why do Robinson and Brahimi ignore these and the many other signs there are that Hamas supports the participation of women in public life?
It is true that there are many Islamist activists in Gaza who pursue campaigns to persuade people to live pious lives. Some of them are Hamas members; many others belong to much more fundamentalist Islamist movements. But I would love it if Ms. Robinson and Mr. Brahimi could cite one Hamas party document in which the party claims ownership of the kinds of campaigns of harrassment they describe.
I also really hate the faux “feminist” tenor of their closing line, which strongly implies that Gaza’s women somehow “yearn to be free” even more than their menfolk. What kind of nonsense is that?
… I am disappointed to see these two generally respected members of the generally wise “Elders” group engaging in this imperialistic kind of faux “feminism”… that is, the articulation by people strongly connected with the west (and that now certainly includes my old friend Lakhdar Brahimi) of a “particular” concern for the plight of the women living in non-western societies, based on the divisive argument that their own menfolk (based on their alleged backwardness, etc) repress them just as badly as their western colonial occupiers do.
Certainly the French used to adduce just exactly this same argument to help support the conceit that they were pursuing a mission civilisatrice in Brahimi’s own native Algeria, back in the day. It is really disappointing to see him dragging it out of the attic now, 50 years later.

Celebrate Laila’s book launch today!

Today’s the day! Laila El-Haddad will be launching her first book, Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between at 6:30 pm EST in Washington DC’s Palestine Center. The event will be livestreamed. So come in person if you can– but if you can’t, make sure to watch the livestreamed version, which you can do by going here.
Details about the live event are here.
I am really thrilled that Laila’s book is on the inaugural list of my new publishing company, Just World Books. It is an author-curated compilation of Laila’s very best blogged and other short-text writings from late 2004 through September 2010. As the title indicates, the book provides an amazingly multi-dimensional view of the life of a Gaza-Palestinian woman of our times. Laila is a wry observer and great recorder of all that she sees. (The fact that she has an MPP from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government attests to her skills in political analysis, as well.)
The book is 444 pages long– and thus a total bargain at $24.95! Don’t be put off by the length, though. First, a lot was happening in those years, which was definitely worth recording. Second, the book contains a broad range of different components, including numerous photos taken by Laila, her dad, and others; lots of adorable (and often very poignant) observations on milestones in her two young kids’ development, and other important facets of family life; some short pieces of poetry, from Mahmoud Darwish and others; maps; one entirely “tweeted” text– and even a recipe! So you won’t be bored for a moment.
the book has garnered fabulous endorsements from, among others, Hanan Ashrawi, Ali Abunimah, and Stephen Walt… and a very thoughtful Foreword by Duke University prof miriam cooke (who hates capitalization.)
So even if you can’t come to the launch event in person, or catch the livestream version, do buy the book— and remember that it makes a great holiday gift for everyone on your list.
If you want to join with a group of friends or a local community group and buy a total of 12 or more of JWB’s four titles (total list is here), then contact JWB for details of how to do that affordably.
** Important notice for readers on the U.S. west coast: We are now organizing a book tour for Laila along the west coast, in early February 2011. If you would like to help with the planning for this, contact me and tell me what ideas you have, how much time you would be able to put into helping us with this– and, of course, where you live. Thanks!

Virginians standing up to Cantor!

A group of home-state Virginians and I are planning to build a network of in-state activists– including our friends in the 7th congressional district– to stand up for our country’s interests against the near-treasonous positions on Israel being articulated by Rep. Eric Cantor.
Last Wednesday evening, on the eve of Israeli PM Netanyahu’s lengthy and difficult meeting with secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Netanyahu had an hour-long tete-a-tete in New York with Cantor, who will be the “House Majority leader”, i.e. the second-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, as of next January. During the meeting, according to a statement issued afterwards by his office, Cantor,

stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington… He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other.

Even Ron Kampeas, the veteran columnist over at the Jewish Telegraph Agency, was astonished, writing,

I can’t remember an opposition leader telling a foreign leader, in a personal meeting, that he would side, as a policy, with that leader against the president. Certainly, in statements on one specific issue or another — building in Jerusalem, or somesuch — lawmakers have taken the sides of other nations. But to have-a-face to face and say, in general, we will take your side against the White House — that sounds to me extraordinary.

You can find much more on the Cantor Rant, from Glenn Greenwald, here.
My friends and I haven’t decided yet what our new network will be called. Maybe something like “Virginians for Our Country’s Sanity” (VOCS)? If you’re a Virginian and you’d like to help us show Rep. Cantor that he doesn’t speak for us (or, indeed, for American military leaders responsible for the lives of thousands of our fellow citizens serving in very dangerous locations overseas), then drop us a line. Give us your name, email (obviously), street address, congressional district, and we’ll see what we can do to build the network.

Laila El-Haddad and Josh Foust books: on Amazon!

It has been a crazy and wonderful week! We launched Josh Foust’s book Afghanistan Journal on Tuesday. Just prior to that, both his book and Laila El-Haddad’s Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between went up for sale on Amazon. I’ve been completing the work on the hardcover version of Chas Freeman’s book America’s Misadventures in the Middle East. And the team were all working along to finalize publication of Reidar Visser’s book A Responsible End? the United States and the Iraqi Transition, 2005-2010 when Reidar wrote to say (metaphorically) “Hold the presses! The Iraqis are about to start forming their new government, and that will be the appropriate end-point for my book!”
So we held off on completing his book. The Iraqi pols did indeed, on Thursday, take the step that brought to an end the presidential council– and thus also, in Visser’s view, the period of “transition” of which the council had been a prominent feature. On Thursday, he wrote a magisterial blog post summing up the dramatic developments of the day; and yesterday he incorporated that new material and a bit of commentary upon it into the final version of the book. He and we are now reviewing the final PDFs of the book… and the first copies of the 300-page tome will be printed on Monday.
Speedy turnaround, or what?
By the way, if you’re in DC, you might still be able to get into Laila’s book launch— next Thursday at 6:30 pm at the Palestine Center.
Any of these books would make great holiday gifts for your family and friends! All are informative, lively, beautifully produced, and affordably priced. You can access all of them as they are published, through our still-developing Just World Books page on Amazon. (Visser’s will take another 7-10 days to get up there.)
We are not, unfortunately, able to give discounts on any retail purchases of our books. But if your community group or a group of friends wants to buy 12 or more JWB books in one purchase, contact us to hear about our terms for that.

The U.S. president, congress, and the world in 2010

I was at a meeting in Washington on Thursday where we were discussing the effects that the Democrats’ drubbing in the November 2 mid-terms could be expected to have on the so-called Israeli-Palestinian “peace process”. Most of the participants were understandably glum. (This was just after the news came out about Netanyahu’s Wednesday-night meeting with the GOP’s incoming House Majority Leader, the dreadful Eric Cantor. See Glenn Greenwald’s excellent commentary on that, here.)
My interest did get kind of piqued, however, when one fairly senior retired diplomat spoke up toward the end of the discussion, and said, “I disagree. I think we will see Obama liberated after the midterms, to conduct foreign policy as he sees fit. He will no longer feel he needs to look over his shoulder to keep his congressional followers behind him– because he won’t have any.”
Well, it was an interesting theory. The speaker went on to talk about how, back in 1994, Pres. Clinton had also had a horrible time in the first midterm elections of his presidency, losing the House to the GOP– but had then gone on to pursue a very successful and imaginative foreign policy.
Um, yes. Maybe. I think I disagree quite a bit about Clinton having pursued a great foreign policy. Weren’t those the years in which, fatally, and at Dennis Ross’s urging, he dropped the ball on nailing down the deadlines to complete the final-status Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement? Did he have to go on and bomb Serbia? Etc., etc.
But even if we “grant” Clinton some success… the world of 2010 is still very, very different from the world of 1994.
In 1994, the United States stood effortlessly astride the whole international system. A U.S. president could make bold moves in foreign policy (even though Clinton really didn’t do very much of that)… But he could have, both because all the other actors around the world were still much punier than the U.S., and because here inside the United States, the legacy of the Cold War and of many decades of custom before that meant that people really did act as if “politics stops at the water’s edge”… That is, even the most partisan critics of the president at home did not do anything that might undermine his ability to conduct an effective diplomacy on the world stage.
How things have changed– in both regards. Example number 1 of the latter shift is Eric Cantor himself, with the assurance he gave to Netanyahu in which, as reported by his office, he “stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration… ”
But the balance has changed a lot internationally since 1994, as well. Even the most cursory reading of the reports from the past week’s G-20 summit Seoul shows that.
In a good report on the FT website yesterday, Alan Beattie wrote,

President Barack Obama arrived in Seoul at this week’s G20 summit chastened by the Democrats’ drubbing in the midterm elections. If he thought that he would find peace by retreating to the rarefied heights of international summitry, he was sadly mistaken.

He went on to note the tide of criticism that has been rising internationally (including among all other 19 members of the G-20), since the U.S. Federal reserve announced its policy of renewed “quantitative easing” (QE2,also known as “printing more dollars”) two weeks ago.
He commented,

being the strong, silent type only works for those powerful enough to let their strength do the talking.

Interesting observation…
Bottom line: Once upon a time, the U.S. was so powerful internationally that a U.S. president could almost always portray himself as successful if he took actions on the world stage… and many U.S. presidents used this power with some success to try to counteract the erosion of their political support at home. (Think of Nixon on his farewell tour to Paris; or earlier, going to China.)
Now, though, that card suddenly doesn’t seem available for a U.S. president. Indeed, Washington’s international clout is so diminished– in part because of the disastrous policies pursued by Pres. G. W. Bush, in part because of other, longer-term processes, including the country’s apparent inability to escape the shackles of heavy, longterm military spending– that today, if a president launches any significant initiative overseas he runs a serious and probably increasing risk of appearing even weaker at home because of the way his initiative gets dissed abroad.
…And so the world turns.

Revealing interview with Khaled Meshaal

The enterprising, Bucharest-based researcher Manuela Paraipan published an interesting, revealing interview with Khaled Meshaal in Open Democracy last week. I’m sorry I don’t have time to analyze it very thoroughly right now– things are really hopping in the publishing business, with two JWB titles about to come out, and another following fast behind!
Anyway, Paraipan’s interview reveals several intriguing aspects both of the personality of Hamas leader Meshaal and of the movement that he leads.
When Paraipan asks Meshaal how he defines himself, he answers thus:

That first sentence there is significant. See how Meshaal’s self-identification as a Muslim comes third– after “Palestinian” and “Arab”. Then, see how he seems to differentiate between “my people” and “the Ummah”, putting his commitment to serving “my people” before that to serving “the Ummah”. The Ummah is of course the entire body of Muslim believers worldwide. “My people” is presumably– and it would have been great if Paraipan had actually pinned this down– the Palestinian people.
Of course, the business about the “long breath” is also very important.
The periodization of Hamas’s history that Paraipan elicits from him is also significant. It ends with this exchange:

This is interesting. Paraipan asks about “armed resistance”. He answers by referring only to “resistance”, without specifying what kind. This, too, would have been a good point to draw him out on a bit more… It is, after all, the case that in 2005, during the months that the Sharon government was pulling the Israeli soldiers and settlers out of the Gaza Strip, Hamas along with Fateh and all the other significant Palestinian movements all committed to, and implemented, a completely unilateral cessation of hostilities against Israel in Gaza. Without that unilateral ceasefire, it is highly probable that Sharon’s withdrawal plan would have been accompanied by high levels of Israeli violence, or would perhaps have been curtailed or abandoned altogether…
You could perhaps say that the policy Hamas (and the other Palestinian movements) were pursuing during those months constituted a form of resistance– but notably not armed resistance. You could also perhaps say that Sharon would never have been motivated to undertake the withdrawal policy if it had not been for earlier instances of armed resistance from Hamas and other movements. But even if we accede to both these arguments, it is still the case that Sharon did not execute his withdrawal under Palestinian fire; and that the withdrawal itself was not directly accompanied by Palestinian “armed resistance”.
In the next portion of his answer, Meshaal describes the extremely important decision Hamas made in 2005 or so, to enter into the two key Palestinian institutions that, until then, it had always both stayed out of and strongly criticized: the pan-Palestinian PLO and the Oslo-derived Palestinian Authority (which exercises some very limited forms of self-governance within Gaza and portions of the West Bank.)
As he described that decision:

be part of the new programme going forward

Paraipan then asks whether the victory Hamas won in the PA’s 2006 parliamentary elections came as a surprise to Meshaal and his colleagues in the leadership. His answer:

Paraipan asks an important question– namely what Meshaal means when he says he is opposed to Israeli “occupation”. The sub-theme in the question seems to be to elicit whether he is referring only to Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, or also to the Yishuv/Israeli military takeover of all of the land that became the State of Israel in 1948.
His answer clearly indicates that he holds to the latter view:

The Palestinian people have lived in Palestine as of right: and we are not talking about history, or back in the middle ages. We are talking about 60 years ago. There is a land called Palestine which belongs to Palestinians. That it was a land for Christians, Muslims and some Jews also does not detract from this. They were living in peace under a Palestinian and Arab regime. A Jewish issue erupted outside the region. Europe wanted to get rid of this problem and it exported it to our region. It thereby ‘killed two birds with one stone’. There was no more ‘Jewish problem’ and, moreover, they were able to exploit a Zionist project designed to expropriate the region’s resources. It is clear to us that Israel was established as part of an offensive against our people. Israel deported them from their own land. To conclude: it is an illegal occupation and we consider its existence illegal in the region.

But he immediately goes on to add this:

on the basis of the borders of 1967, with Jerusalem as the capital, and the right of refugees to return.

There is then another intriguing short exchange between Paraipan and Meshaal:

Anyway, those are what I see as the highlights of the interview. There is a lot more there. Go read it all!

Yesterday’s Taksim Square bomb

Thanks to everyone who’s expressed concern for my wellbeing after yesterday’s bomb in Taksim Square.
In the incident, a suicide bomber detonated himself at the entrance to a police bus. He killed himself and injured 15 police officers and 17 members of the public. Te indications seem to be it was PKK-related, though Al-Qaeda has also undertaken terror acts in Turkey in the past.
I wish for a speedy and full recovery for all those injured.
The police seemed to do a good job of cordoning off the square, sending in forensics teams to gather evidence, etc.
Taksim Square is a very symbolic high point at the hub of Istanbul’s commercial area. In the evening we walked along Istiklal Caddesi, one-third of a mile or less away from the square, and though the crowds seemed a little diminished, many Istanbullers were going ahead with their life and showing admirable resilience in the face of the terror attempt.
Still, the event does perhaps underline the need for the government to get the PKK issue resolved– politically, which is the only way this can be achieved.

D. Broder and the war fever in Washington

Just how serious the current, rising epidemic of war fever is in Washington DC is indicated by a column in today’s WaPo in which veteran pundit David Broder argues quite clearly that for Pres. Obama, “orchestrating a showdown” with the regime in Iran in 2011 and 2012 will be a successful policy at both the political level and that of the U.S. economy.
Broder, whom I hitherto long respected as a voice of relative (and relatively conservative) sanity on the Washington DC, seems to have lost his capacity for rational argument.
The last five paragraphs of his column need to examined in full:

The rhetorical thrust of that last paragraph is confused. “I am not suggesting… that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century… ”
The claim that he is “not suggesting … that the president incite a war to get reelected” is perhaps true in some purely technical sense. But if he is not suggesting that Obama “incite a war”, he certainly is arguing outright that,

he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

I almost do not know where to start in explaining the intensity of the disappointment I feel in reading this piece from Broder.
Let me try:
1. David Broder has not traditionally been one of the war-mongers (like Jackson Diehl, Jim Hoagland, etc) on the WaPo’s opinion page. I think I remember him expressing some caution when writing back in 2002 about the possibility of an imminent war with Iraq. If the irrationalities of war fever have reached even into David Broder’s soul at this time, then the miasmas in Washington must be even worse than I thought.
2. No-one who has any idea of the effects warfare has on the lives and livelihoods of the residents of the war-zone should ever talk or write glibly at all about the possibility of yet another of humankind’s too-long history of wars being launched. Broder may write that the implications of the possibility of another war “are frightening”. But then, he goes to say that Obama can— and also, by very strong implication should— do this if he wants to be “regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.”
David Broder, what has happened to your sense of humanity??
3. At the purely “technical” level, the argument that launching a war (sorry, “orchestrating a showdown”) with Tehran will ipso facto be good for the U.S. economy is just mind-boggling. David Broder, don’t you remember all the claims made in 2002 that invading Iraq would help the U.S. economy by “bringing down the cost of oil”– and that even if that did not occur, well anyway, the whole invasion and occupation would be largely self-financing because the Iraqis and others would end up paying for it, not the U.S. taxpayer. Why, I believe you even argued against some of those claims back in 2002.
But what effect did the invasion of Iraq actually end up having on the U.S economy? It has been– continues to be– a horrendous drain, having eaten up more than $1 trillion already, and still counting.
Where, David Broder, can you find even one shred of evidence that a war against Iran would be any better for the U.S. economy than that?
Your FDR/World War II argument is flawed, as well. It was true that World War II ended up, at some level, being “good” for the U.S. economy. But by no stretch of the imagination can it be said that Pres. Roosevelt entered the war with the goal of improving the U.S. economy. For him and other members of his generation, the searing economic privations that they had seen the previous World War inflicting on Europe was a powerful disincentive to go to war. When Washington did enter the war it was because the U.S. Navy had been attacked.
No-one has attacked the U.S. on this occasion.
Indeed, the almost certain effects that a U.S. “showdown with the mullahs” would have on the world economy, and therefore on our own, are staggeringly negative. World oil markets could be brought to a standstill. Most other major players in the world economy would not blame Iran for this. They would blame the country that unnecessarily escalated the tensions with Iran toward the “showdown”. The costs they might impose on the U.S.– economically and in other ways– could well be staggering. (Remember that the soundness of the dollar is, actually, dependent on the kindness of strangers.)
… You mention none of these probable economic consequences of a war. Indeed, you don’t even attempt to adduce any evidence as to why, in the 2010’s, the forcing of a “showdown with the mullahs” could be good for the U.S. economy at all. You just write, “as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve;” and you use the facile comparison with FDR and World War II– which happened in an era when the world’s economy, as well as its political balance, were very different from today.
You are discussing an extremely serious issue here in a way that is intellectually lazy to the point of near-dishonesty, as well as mind-bogglingly belligerent.
David Broder, I am very disappointed.

More impressions, Istanbul

So many conversations, so many amazing meals, so much history.
One major thing that has emerged from the conversations, for me, is a much more robust sense that what we are seeing in Turkey today is not a function just of the actions and policies of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), but also of deeper processes within Turkey’s society and state. Which is to say, really, that even if the AKP were not the ruling party here (and there is zero indication at this point that they will lose the parliamentary elections coming up in May 2011), then most of the same policies we see today would continue to be enacted by any other party that came in.
I do think the democratization of political life that has been taking place in this country of some 72 million people is the “big” political story– and it is one that other political parties, and even to a significant extent the military hierarchy itself, have contributed to. It is never easy to get the military to step aside from exercising political power; but here in Turkey that seems finally to have occurred. And surely the current chief of the general staff, Gen. Isik Kosaner, and his top aides must have played a key role in this. The success– by 58% to 40%– of last month’s referendum on a broad range of constitutional matters was an important bench-mark in the campaign to replace military rule with democratic accountability.
(I have heard some indications that Turkey’s membership in NATO had a positive effect in helping to educate leaders of the country’s military in the need for civilian control of the military. In which case, kudos to NATO. Maybe this is one of the few really positive achievements NATO can point to in its history? We could, also, imagine other ways in which democracy-promoting countries might have spread the crucial notion of civilian control of the military to Turkey… But still, if NATO helped to do it, then well and good.)
* * *
We had lunch the other day with a man in his early thirties whose father, back in the early 1980s, was assassinated by what the Turks helpfully refer to as the “deep state”… That is, that network of shadowy parastatal and paramilitary organizations that maintained the military’s effective (and also, until last month, often constitution-permitted) control over the country through extra-constitutional means. Our friend was two years old at the time. His mother then had to bring her two boys up alone. His father had been the editor of an Islamist journal– to which the present PM, Rejep Teyyip Erdogan– had been a contributor.
More on this, later. But of course it is important to remember the many people whose lives were blighted by the actions of the deep state.
* * *
Yesterday, a friend took us on an excellent tour around some of Istanbul’s lesser known sites and neighborhoods. We started at the Greek Patriarchate, at the top of a hill in Carsamba. The Patriarchate and many of the Greek homes, institutions, and businesses in this neighborhood and elsewhere throughout the city were badly sacked during anti-Greek and anti-Jewish riots that took place– with some instigation from the government– in 1955. In recent years, the large administrative buildings there have all been rebuilt, in what looks like a very solid and well-financed way. The friend who was with us said there are still disagreements over whether the Patriarchate is an institution of the Turkish state, or an independent institution.
We went into the church there. (It was surprisingly small.) Over at one side of the sanctuary were two boxes made of some form of sturdy translucent plastic, each the size of a portable sewing machine lying on its side, and each elevated on four legs. Our friend told us these contained just a tiny portion of the vast haul of Orthodox ecclesiastical relics that had been looted by the crusaders when they sacked Istanbul in 1096. He said these two small boxes of stuff had been returned to the church here by the Vatican a few years ago– “But the vast majority of what the Crusaders looted, the Catholics kept. Like the four horsemen you still see till today in St. Mark’s Square, in Venice.”
* * *
We drove along the length of the massive city walls the Byzantines built right across the hilly heights of the peninsular on whose tip their city was perched, running two miles or so from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara. These walls were truly a huge feat of engineering: A double layer of them, maybe 30-40 feet high, extremely thick, and punctuated by frequent large block-house/guard-towers. Those walls, and a thinner, single set of walls along the coastline, were what they relied on for protection.
After the Ottoman dynasty had established itself in Bursa, to the southeast, the other side of the Sea of Marmara, it was able to conquer and incorporate vast swathes of land beyond Byzantium to the north and west– including, right up to Bulgaria. But they still could not take Byzantium. And the Byzantines made a heavy chain that they strung across the Golden Horn to prevent Ottoman shipping, which was able to move up and down the Bosphorus, from using the Golden Horn route to come in and take their city from its more vulnerable northern or western sides.
I guess the chain worked. Because when the young Sultan Mehmet (the Conqueror) decided to capture the city he did not try that direct naval route. Instead, starting at a point a little further north up the Bosphorus, he constructed a large slipway right over the northwestern isthmus of the city and dragged his entire attack fleet up and over the landmass to get around the chain, instead. And that worked for him. He took Byzantium in 1453.
* * *
Friday was Independence Day. We were lucky enough to be included in a fabulous party at a sixth-floor apartment overlooking the Bosphorus, from where we had a great view of the wonderful firework show put on– presumably by the Istanbul Municipality– from barges out on the water. (Some of us remarked that staging a huge firework show like this is a sign of significant peace and prosperity. A city like Baghdad, Kabul, or Gaza could not dream of being able to “enjoy” such sounds and sights without everyone thinking it was an attack… )
Turkey’s attainment in 1923 of national independence from the yoke that WW-I’s victorious allies had sought to impose on the country was no small achievement. However, the prickly (and often very aggressive) ethnonationalism and militarism that were both part of the Kemalist package (i.e., the package of policies enacted by the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk) continued to plague Turkey and its peoples until very recently.
Now, the country finally has a stable and well-performing government that is non-Kemalist. I was going to write “anti-Kemalist”, but I don’t think that’s the case. They are still Kemalists inasmuch as they accept the republican and democratic basis of the state that Ataturk pioneered, and the institutions associated with that concept of the state. They have tweaked, in an important way, the relationship between the military and the civilian government that had long been dysfunctional and harmful for the country. But the rest of the Kemalist constitutional structure still stands intact.
Where they are not Kemalist, however, is in their views of secularism and ethnonationalism. They are not the same militant secularizers that the Kemalists were. And they are certainly not the same ethnonationalists as the Kemalists.
85 years of Kemalism did, however, leave the AKP government with some terrible legacies to deal with when it came into power through the elections of 2002. Legacies of harms inflicted in the past on the country’s Kurdish, Greek, and Jewish citizens. Legacies of aggressive ethnonationalist policies pursued towards many neighbors, especially in Cyprus… The AKP’s very talented leaders, including President Abdullah Gul and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, as well as Erdogan, seem to have taken numerous good steps to deal with these legacies and to build much healthier relations both inside Turkey and with neighbors outside it…
* * *

Istanbul, for all that ails you

Today, I feel like maybe I died and went to heaven. I am sitting in an apartment that is perched on the heights of Istanbul’s Cehangir neighborhood right across the Golden Horn from the Topkapi Palace. I stare out of the picture windows at the confluence of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus. Ferry-boats of all sizes ply busily this way and that across the broad waterways. Seagulls wheel and shriek in the light mist. A tram clangs somewhere far beneath me. There is a steady hum of traffic.
Last night the towers of Topkapi, and the great rotund masses of Agia Sofia and the Blue Mosque all sat like jewels, bathed in the amber tones of great floodlighting. All the great mosques of that part of the city– and even many of the smaller ones, including the one near us in Galatasaray– are floodlit at night. The lights from Topkapi and the waterfront mosques bleed out across the water towards us. At night, each ferry-boat scuttles across the water suspended above the inky depths on the insect legs of its own reflected lights.
In the past, I have thought of Istanbul as “Venice on Steroids”: that combination of an organic reliance on waterways and their boat-systems, with the sheer weight and wealth of stupendous religious monuments. But the two cities are different in important ways, as well. Where Venice lies flat, beached (and sinking) at the top end of the Aegean, Istanbul sits astride what is evidently an extremely busy international waterway. Last year when we were here we were sitting at an outdoor restaurant near the second bridge across the Bosphorus and behind our friends as we sat there, there passed a long procession of vast tankers and container boats traveling up to the countries of the Black Sea.
And Istanbul (unlike Venice) is exuberantly 3-D: There is not a flat street in sight except those that flank the city’s many coastlines. Yesterday afternoon we walked to Istiklal Cadessi through a network of small streets that plunged up and down the hillsides here: No other way to get there! City residents must all be extremely fit! Istiklal Cadessi (Independence Street) and a very high proportion of the smaller side streets were all humming with activity. On the backstreets, there are sidewalk cafes just about everywhere. And never mind about those sloping sidewalks: The enterprising business owners have put in long platforms that give each group of tables a flat base to stand on. Okay, it pushes pedestrians into the street; but many of these small streets are actually or effectively pedestrianized, anyway.
We had dinner with Soli Ozel and his family. Great to catch up with him and hear his (generally but not wholly admiring) views of the policies of the present government. The criticisms he voiced were mainly that the government could have been smarter in some aspects of its diplomacy– especially on Iran, where he thought Turkey should have abstained on the recent resolution in the Security Council, rather than voting against it. But he did concur with the judgment that– according to Bill the spouse, who has been here since the beginning of the month– is quite widespread here, namely that PM Erdogan is one of the most talented political leaders that Turkey has ever seen.
There is, as always, a lot going on here politically. I still think that the transition Turkey has made since 1999, from what was still a military-backed system of government to one in which the democratic basis of governance has been much more solidly entrenched than hitherto, is a really important experience that democrats worldwide should hold up and appreciate. And the two facts that this transition has been achieved through almost wholly nonviolent means and that it has been undertaken largely though not wholly by a moderately and democratically Islamist party are both really, really important.
It is great to see Istanbul and the whole of Turkey doing so well in the current times! While economic woes continue to plague much of the “west” today, the course that this country has been on since the end of the Cold War has overwhelmingly been one of opening new markets and new (or, more accurately, renewed) cultural and political ties with all the countries around it in a dazzling 360-degree display of smart outreach. And the success of that outreach really shows– in the buzzing activity, self-confidence, and nice lifestyles you see in the streets here. (Istanbul is stunningly well-run as a city, too. It is significant that Erdogan and his AK Party cut their political teeth here back in the 1990s by proving they could run this city well, before they moved on to take over the commanding heights of national politics.)
Where our apartment is, here near the Galatasaray district, is not far from the area Orhan Pamuk wrote about growing up in, in his memoir “Istanbul”. The Istanbul of Pamuk’s youth was drenched in sadness, neediness, and nostalgia for the loss of the city’s past glories. The contrast with the way the city feels today could not be starker!
I feel so lucky to be here. When Bill first set up the short-term teaching gig he has at Bilgi University, the idea was that we would come together for the month. But then, I realized October would be really busy for Just World Books, so I shortened my stay to one week… Well, I am still doing a bunch of work for the three books JWB will have coming out within the next month– three! count ’em! But at least as I sit here connected to the Intertubes, I have the supreme joy of looking out over this amazing view. And then, from time to time, I can even detach myself from the ‘tubes and go out and have some real-life experiences of today’s Turkey… Wow. Even in the drizzly rain it is all spectacular.