sULTAN eRDOGAN; DIPLOMATIC SWINDLER

[Aratta-Kingdom]

 

 

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=178022

 

 

How Erdogan overplayed his hand

The Jerusalem Post

 

By AMOTZ ASA-EL

06/11/2010 16:18

 

 

Israel’s mistakes vis-à-vis the flotilla crisis were tactical; Turkey’s were strategic.

 

 

 

So the Mossad, the navy and the government were caught off guard, not to mention Israel’s PR system, such as it is. Yet at the end of the day theirs were tactical failures alongside a sensible strategy, which is to defend the Jews and fight their enemies. In Turkey it has been the other way around, with a tactically impressive foreign policy now proving strategically catastrophic.

 

For seven years Recep Tayyip Erdogan has fooled everyone about his agenda and character. The more time elapsed, however, the more the makeup wore thin and the masks came off, and now the entire costume party has ended amid much tragedy and farce.

 

Erdogan’s quest for “zero problems” with Turkey’s many neighbors struck the international community as the kind of Islam the world so badly craved: pragmatic, tolerant and dialoguing. Turkey’s leaders smooched with their Greek archenemies, celebrated a pact with the Armenians, allowed Kurdish TV broadcasts, accommodated Syria and for the first time in decades visited Iraq.

 

True, some of these packages proved more poorly sewn than initially claimed. The Armenian deal stalled as it involved no Turkish concession on genocide recognition, and the gestures toward the Kurds left out what matters most – permission to run schools in Kurdish. Still, Turkey lent no reason to suspect its sincerity.

 

Not anymore. Erdogan has now made his country’s many historic enemies suspect that he is a liar, a wolf in sheep’s clothing who thinks he can fool everyone all the time.

 

SUSPICIONS THAT Erdogan is a diplomatic swindler arose already two weeks after he entered office in spring ’03, when the Turkish parliament vetoed America’s entry into northern Iraq through Turkey. At the time, few understood this development, which was overcome militarily with an improvised, but well executed, airborne landing.

 

Politically, it was Erdoganesque cunning at its purest. The American operation he nearly derailed was not the kind for which Turkish governments seek legislative approval. Yet Erdogan manufactured a “prohibition” which allowed him to pretend to be constrained by the very democracy that had made America wage its war in the first place.

 

Similarly, initial impressions that Erdogan was a moderate Muslim out to uphold Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s legacy eventually gave way to a crawling counterrevolution, whereby the secular military, media and judiciary have been gradually strong-armed into submission.

 

And that, in fact, is the problem with Erdogan’s many half-truths, diversions and downright lies; they can only last so long. Eventually everyone begins to suspect they are being taken for a ride.

 

To hear Erdogan yelling at us, the Jews, as he did this week “Thou shalt not murder” (“I will now say it in Hebrew!”) is grotesque. This is the man who won’t recognize his country’s mass murder of the Armenians last century, the great lover of humanity whose typically escapist response to the American and Swedish legislatures’ recognition of the Armenian genocide was to furiously recall his ambassadors from Washington and Stockholm.

 

Turkey’s many historic victims, from Serbia and Bulgaria through Romania and Hungary to Cyprus, Armenia, Kurdistan and the Arabs are now quietly taking stock of the man behind the Flotilla Affair, and they have no choice but to suspect they have business with the kind of Turk they would all rather forget. The man is trouble, an Islamist loose cannon in a world brimming with Islamist fervor, malcontents and agents.

 

IT IS only a matter of time before the Turkish middle class joins the elite in wondering just how much Erdogan’s adventurism will cost them.

 

It is bad enough that he embarrasses his people when he says, for instance, that he can’t allow schools to teach in Kurdish because that kind of minority right is not accorded anywhere in the world. Of course it’s allowed, for instance in Israel, where Arab schools teach in Arabic. And it is of course bad enough when Erdogan is so inconsistent as to demand that Germany allow its 0.3 percent Turkish minority the kind of cultural autonomy he won’t allow his own 15% Kurdish minority.

 

It is also bad for Turkey that its leader is now perceived across the world as a demagogue. Erdogan missed the irony of him, the man who hosted Sudan’s convicted perpetrator of genocide Omar Bashir, publicly hollering at Nobel Peace laureate Shimon Peres, “You are killing babies in Gaza.” Millions of others, however, did not miss the irony, and they realize they have business with a thug whose definition of morality and immorality is what is good or bad for him, rather than what is good or bad regardless of him.

 

It is certainly bad for Turkey to be associated with anti-Semitism, a disease with which it was never preciously plagued.

 

 

Erdogan likes to declare that he loathes anti-Semitism. He visited the chief rabbi of Turkey after a terror attack on a synagogue in Istanbul, and this week he hosted Israeli rabbi Menachem Froman. Alas, such gestures, beside suggesting he distinguishes between the Jews’ right to their faith and their right to their land, become meaningless when he succumbs to the basest anti-Semitic profanity – the blood libel. As long as he is in power, Turkey will be at odds with the entire Jewish people, a proven recipe for the kind of decline that befell Spain after the expulsion and Russia after communism, not to mention Germany after Nazism.

 

Yet the worst thing for Turkey is to be associated with provocation per se.

 

Erdogan has convinced his country’s many historic enemies, most of all Russia, that he is a dangerous hothead who must be contained. For Russia, modern Turkey is but a reincarnation of the power with which it had 12-odd wars between 1568 and 1917. For Russia, Ankara’s meddling in superpower politics by intriguing with Iran and Brazil was an alarm bell, the kind Erdogan was originally careful to avoid ringing, until he became overconfident, forgetting that a nuclearized Islamic axis of the sort everyone now suspects he is cultivating is for Vladimir Putin what a Cuban A-bomb was for John F. Kennedy.

 

All intelligence services suspicious of Turkey – and they add up to at least a dozen – know the truth about the flotilla. They know it was inspired, and very likely masterminded, by Erdogan; that it was a metaphor for his entire foreign policy, a loudly trumpeted, well financed and poorly camouflaged voyage of zealots who elbowed their way into a ship of fools, in order to pick a fight where the world least needed one. Erdogan has now made all suspect Turkey of quietly feeding the very Islamism that is the bane of the entire world. What action all this will produce is a separate question, but the mask has come off, and it’s too late to put it back on.

 

 

 

[Aratta-Kingdom]

TURKEY AND ARMENIA: TWO VAST AND UGLY BLOCKS OF STONE - ECONOMIST

 

Tert.am

14.01.11

 

Statues in Kars are not safe when Recep Tayyip Erdogan is around. When

Turkey's prime minister visited the city last year, the local mayor,

who belongs to Erdogan's mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK)

party, sought to avoid his ire by ordering the removal of a public

fountain featuring bare-breasted nymphs.

 

Last week, during another trip to Kars, which lies about 45km west

of the border with Armenia, Erdogan called for the demolition of a

local monument designed to promote reconciliation between Turks and

Armenians. The statue, of two 30-metre-tall concrete figures reaching

out to each other, was, he said, a "freak".

 

Erdogan insisted that his distaste was purely aesthetic. Yet some

suspect him of pandering to nationalist sentiment in the run-up

to elections in June. Many Turks see the statue as an admission of

Armenia's charge that the slaughter of up to 1.5m Armenians by Ottoman

forces in 1915 amounted to genocide.

 

In 2009 the then mayor of Kars, Naif Alibeyoglu, who had commissioned

the statue, was forced out under pressure from Erdogan and the city's

20% ethnic Azeri population (egged on by Azerbaijan, which disliked

Turkey's efforts to make peace with Armenia).

 

Erdogan has backed away from a set of protocols signed with Armenia

in 2009 that foresaw the establishment of diplomatic relations and

the reopening of borders. These were sealed in 1993 after Armenia's

short war with Azerbaijan over the mainly Armenian enclave of

Nagorno-Karabakh. Erdogan insists that the protocols can only be

ratified if Armenia withdraws from seven regions it occupies around

the enclave. Armenia is threatening to scrap the deal altogether.

 

But there is also a whiff of Islamic orthodoxy in the air. Erdogan's

tirade against the Kars statue included references to Hasan Harakani,

an ancient Muslim scholar buried nearby.

 

"They erected a strange thing next to his mausoleum... it is

unthinkable," he complained. Many Muslim scholars consider statues

to be idolatrous, and other AK officials have not disguised their

aversion to them. Ankara's mayor, Melih Gokcek, has systematically

dismantled statues erected by his pro-secular predecessors. "I spit

on this kind of art," he once said.

 

Mehmet Aksoy, the designer of the Kars monument, says that the

government risks being seen as "the Taliban" if it presses its

demands. But Turkey's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has backed

his boss, arguing that Aksoy's work fails to blend into the Seljuk,

Ottoman and Russian character of the city. He might have included

Kars' Armenian legacy, but that is being erased. A long-abandoned

tenth-century Armenian church recently reopened - as a mosque.

 

[Aratta-Kingdom]

The genetic garbage has lost the touch with the reality:

 

 

 

WHO IS THE NEXT?

 

news.am

July 29, 2011

Armenia

 

The mainstream media focused attention on Turkish Prime Minister Recep

Tayyip Erdogan's "complex" about apologies". In fact, this year the

Turkish PM demanded "apologies" from Germany, Israel and Armenia.

 

1.Germany

 

"Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded an apology from

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday over recent accusations

that Turkey is not taking sufficient steps toward resolving the Cyprus

issue," Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review reported.

 

"It is meaningful that the Chancellor of Germany carries her populist

politics into Cyprus. Those statements do not give the impression of

a leader with vision. We say that Merkel should revise her knowledge

of history and apologize," Erdogan told his deputies during a Justice

and Development Party, or AKP, parliamentary group meeting in Ankara."

 

"The harsh comments came after Merkel described the Turkish Cypriot

presence in northern Cyprus as an "invasion" during a recent visit

to southern Cyprus. She criticized Turkey and Turkish Cypriots for

not doing enough to reach a deal with Greek Cypriots."

 

"Merkel's statements not only hurt but they also reflect a lack

of historical knowledge and contradict statements she made in the

past," Erdogan said. "Merkel showed how unfamiliar she is with Cyprus

dispute."

 

Stressing that the European Union and the United Nations were

ultimately responsible for the negotiations, Erdogan said they were

still looking for a criminal and blamed Turkey. However, Turkey would

not give away a single gram of northern Cyprus, he said.

 

2.Israel

 

"Relations between Israel and Turkey continue to be cold as the report

on what happened on board of the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara vessel

pertaining to a flotilla that was heading for Gaza with humanitarian

help is about to be read on the floor of the United Nations," Metrolic

reports referring to the confrontation between Israel and Turkey.

 

In spite of rumors about secret talks between Turkish and Israeli

leaderships to the purpose of thawing relations between two state that

used to have excellent relations, in a speech delivered on Friday to

the parliament Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan gave no

sign of softening, and restated that there would be no improvement

in the relations between the two sides unless Israel presented an

apology for the loss of nine Turkish lives in the clash with the

Israeli Defense Forces during the boarding, on May 30, 2010.

 

Erdogan said that normalization was "unthinkable," unless the Israelis

apologized for the "illegal act which is against international law,"

until payment was made to the relatives of those killed in "this

atrocious event," and the embargo on Gaza was lifted.

 

The raising of the stakes by adding the lifting the embargo on Gaza

proves that Turkish Prime Minister feels that Israel may be in a

difficult spot right now and could consent to at least some of these

demands, though it is unconceivable that it would lift the blockade

on Gaza. Or maybe not.

 

Erdogan's remarks in parliament come at the end of an European tour

Benyamin Netanyahu took to Europe, during which he visited France,

UK, Germany and two states in Eastern Europe: Romania and Bulgaria.

 

While in Bulgaria, Netanyahu practically promised the Bulgarians

something as big as a "merger" between the economy of Israel and that

of their country, signing more economic treaties and sealing off more

deals than Bulgarians had ever dreamt of.

 

Did he send a message to Ankara by proclaiming Bulgaria, one of the

poorest countries within the European Union, the strategic partner

of Israel in the Balkans, a place where Turkey has huge interests, or

was he just courting the Bulgarians for their vote in the U.N. General

Assembly in September in case Palestinians want to proclaim a state of

their one and demand official recognition? Or was he simply interested

in putting Bulgarian food on the table of the Israelis? Could have

been all three combined.

 

Israel agreed last year to pay compensations to the families of the

people killed in the IDF's raid, and even to express regret for the

loss of their lives, but under no circumstance did it agree to offer

an apology, which would be in their eyes admitting that they had been

acting outside the frame of the international law, which they have

systematically denied.

 

Since the beginning of the inquiries in the case Israel affirmed that

the actions of the IDF were perfectly legitimate, though unfortunately

they resulted in loss of human lives."

 

3. Armenia

 

"Israel can take solace that it is not the only country in the world

from which Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is seeking

an apology: On Wednesday he demanded one from Armenia as well,"

The Jerusalem Post reports.

 

"The Turkish news website Today's Zaman, reporting on Erdogan's current

trip to Azerbaijan, quoted him as saying that Armenian President Serzh

Sarksyan should apologize for calling on Armenian school children to

occupy eastern Turkey.

 

Sarksyan, asked by a student if Armenia would get back its "western

territories" along with Mount Ararat - an area of great historical

significance to Armenians - that's now in Turkey, replied that

"it depends on you and your generation. I believe my generation

has fulfilled the task in front of us; when it was necessary in the

beginning of the '90s to defend part of our fatherland - Karabakh -

from the enemy, we did it. I am not telling this to embarrass anyone.

 

My point is that each generation has its responsibilities and they

have to be carried out with honor.

 

The statement infuriated Turkey. According to Today's Zaman, Erdogan

said Sarksyan's behavior was a provocation and an attempt to fill youth

with hatred, which he said would lead Armenia's youth into "darkness."

 

"There cannot be such diplomacy. Sarksyan has made a very serious

mistake.... He must apologize," Erdogan was quoted as saying.

 

Erdogan's demand for an Armenian apology comes just a few days after

he threatened Israel with a "Plan B" - a further downgrading of ties -

if it did not apologize for last year'sMavi Marmara incident.

 

"What we see here is a pattern developing," one Israeli diplomatic

source said of Erdogan's most recent demand for an apology. "Who

is going to ask Erdogan to apologize for Turkey's occupation of

northern Cyprus?"

 

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's senior forum of

eight ministers - a body known as the octet - met on Wednesday, but,

according to government officials, did not deal with the Mavi Marmara

issue because Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon was not present.

 

So, who is the next in the Turkish premier's "list"?

 

[Yervant1]

Mr. erdoghan or latedoghan whatever the hell his name is, should ask apology from the diaspora Armenians as well, for interfering in political affairs of Armenia.

 

What a quack! I thought our leaders were bad, definitely this helldoghan takes the cake.