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RISE OF 'TURKISH GANDHI' OFFERS HOPE TO DIVIDED NATION
The Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/rise-of-turkish-gandhi-offers-hope-to-divided-nation/article1586255/
May 31 2010
Canada
Lurid sex scandal propels reformer into leadership of party founded
by Kemal Ataturk, giving opposition credible shot at power
Doug Saunders
Ankara -- From Monday's Globe and Mail Published on Monday, May. 31,
2010 2:35AM EDT
.Not just for his mild demeanour, his softly bespectacled appearance
and his conciliatory, incorruptible reputation is he known in some
circles here as the "Turkish Gandhi."
As an ethnic minority bidding to lead a nation whose laws have
officially denied that minorities exist, and as a man able to
bridge the increasingly distrustful poles of a divided nation, Kemal
Kilacdaroglu has the potential to change the nature of politics here -
if he has the nerve to seize either opportunity.
In the wake of a lurid sex scandal that drove his long-serving
predecessor, Deniz Baykal, out of office last weekend after Mr. Baykal
was videotaped having an affair with a staffer, the little-known
financial bureaucrat and reformer, Kemal Kilacdaroglu, 61, was
suddenly thrust into the leadership of Turkey's venerable secular
opposition party.
Almost overnight, he has given a credible shot at power to the
beleaguered party founded by Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern
secular Turkey. The CHP (Republican People's Party) was driven
into distant second place after 2002 by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan's Islamic Peace and Justice party (AKP), which has blended
the religious conservatism popular among the poor with a pro-business,
pro-Europe worldliness that has turned Turkey into an economic force.
In his first major interview with the North American media, Mr.
Kilacdaroglu spent an hour in his Ankara office describing how he
would take back the CHP, in part by paying less attention to the rigid
secularism and self-contained nationalism that Mr. Ataturk considered
the cornerstones of Turkish identity.
But he refused abjectly to use his most surprising quality to take on
an Obama-like role of a minority leading a party that spent decades
enforcing laws that made minorities illegal and unmentionable.
He is an Alevi - a member of Turkey's Shiite Muslim minority who have
been brutally repressed under previous CHP governments - and a man who
spent his childhood as a poor villager in a Kurdish-majority region
(neither he nor his party will discuss whether his family background
is Kurdish).
"Since I believe that beliefs should not be the core of politics,
I don't think it should really matter whether I'm Alevi, Sunni or
anything else," he said, uneasily, when asked about whether he would
use his ethnic identity as a new sign of openness.
"My political approach is one in which beliefs and origins, like
ethnicity, are not emphasized, but a human-based politics, where the
core of everything is human."
Mr. Kilacdaroglu did say, however, that he would support efforts -
including a possible constitutional change - to make Turkey acknowledge
that it is not a country with one ethnic group and one language, as
has been the law for decades, but a place with a number of languages,
religions and ethnicities, in which Alevites, Kurds and Armenians
have struggled against campaigns of forced assimilation or outright
cleansing.
"Turkey took the heritage of the Ottoman Empire, and that was a
multicultural, multiethnic community, so we cannot neglect or ignore
these minorities," he said. "On the contrary, we accept them as part
of the richness of our culture."
This statement, which would be a bland platitude in North America
and much of Europe, marks a revolutionary change in Turkey's secular
establishment. It is still illegal to use the letters W, Q or X -
part of the Kurdish, but not the Turkish, alphabet. The CHP has
rigorously backed the law against "insulting Turkishness," which
has been used to imprison dissidents, including Kurds and Armenians,
who have dared suggest that Turkey's past included atrocities.
Much of this has changed under Mr. Erdogan, who has allowed the Kurdish
language to be spoken and opened a Kurdish-language public TV network;
has entered negotiations aimed at normalizing relations with Armenia;
and has sought a rapprochement with the leaders of Cyprus over the
Turkish-occupied province of North Cyprus.
This sense of dynamism inspired many otherwise secular-minded
Turks to back Mr. Erdogan's AKP, despite their discomfort with its
headscarf-wearing female MPs and attempts to restrict alcohol sales.
The CHP has offered little other than secularism, and a closed,
nationalistic culture and economy.
On the need to win people back from the AKP, Mr. Kilacdaroglu mades
his most shocking suggestion: that the party stop talking about
secularism all the time.
"I believe that to those people who have gone to the AKP, especially
the poor, we should not be emphasizing the principle of secularism,"
he said. "Their priority is to be able to feed themselves."
Mr. Kilacdaroglu said he isn't completely willing to move away from the
old ways: He spoke fervently about the need for government subsidies
and a less aggressive path toward European Union membership, But he
would reform the electoral system, allowing parties with less than
10 per cent of the vote to sit in power - a move, though he wouldn't
acknowledge this, whose main beneficiary would be the Kurdish party. It
would also hurt the AKP, which has won a strong Kurdish following.
If Mr. Kilacdaroglu is to have any chance in next year's elections,
he will have to give these new politics a voice. Polls show that
the CHP gained support after he took over the leadership, but still
lags behind. If he is to build on this sense of electoral novelty,
he may discover that his own startling narrative is his most potent
political weapon.
From: A. Papazian
The Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/rise-of-turkish-gandhi-offers-hope-to-divided-nation/article1586255/
May 31 2010
Canada
Lurid sex scandal propels reformer into leadership of party founded
by Kemal Ataturk, giving opposition credible shot at power
Doug Saunders
Ankara -- From Monday's Globe and Mail Published on Monday, May. 31,
2010 2:35AM EDT
.Not just for his mild demeanour, his softly bespectacled appearance
and his conciliatory, incorruptible reputation is he known in some
circles here as the "Turkish Gandhi."
As an ethnic minority bidding to lead a nation whose laws have
officially denied that minorities exist, and as a man able to
bridge the increasingly distrustful poles of a divided nation, Kemal
Kilacdaroglu has the potential to change the nature of politics here -
if he has the nerve to seize either opportunity.
In the wake of a lurid sex scandal that drove his long-serving
predecessor, Deniz Baykal, out of office last weekend after Mr. Baykal
was videotaped having an affair with a staffer, the little-known
financial bureaucrat and reformer, Kemal Kilacdaroglu, 61, was
suddenly thrust into the leadership of Turkey's venerable secular
opposition party.
Almost overnight, he has given a credible shot at power to the
beleaguered party founded by Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern
secular Turkey. The CHP (Republican People's Party) was driven
into distant second place after 2002 by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan's Islamic Peace and Justice party (AKP), which has blended
the religious conservatism popular among the poor with a pro-business,
pro-Europe worldliness that has turned Turkey into an economic force.
In his first major interview with the North American media, Mr.
Kilacdaroglu spent an hour in his Ankara office describing how he
would take back the CHP, in part by paying less attention to the rigid
secularism and self-contained nationalism that Mr. Ataturk considered
the cornerstones of Turkish identity.
But he refused abjectly to use his most surprising quality to take on
an Obama-like role of a minority leading a party that spent decades
enforcing laws that made minorities illegal and unmentionable.
He is an Alevi - a member of Turkey's Shiite Muslim minority who have
been brutally repressed under previous CHP governments - and a man who
spent his childhood as a poor villager in a Kurdish-majority region
(neither he nor his party will discuss whether his family background
is Kurdish).
"Since I believe that beliefs should not be the core of politics,
I don't think it should really matter whether I'm Alevi, Sunni or
anything else," he said, uneasily, when asked about whether he would
use his ethnic identity as a new sign of openness.
"My political approach is one in which beliefs and origins, like
ethnicity, are not emphasized, but a human-based politics, where the
core of everything is human."
Mr. Kilacdaroglu did say, however, that he would support efforts -
including a possible constitutional change - to make Turkey acknowledge
that it is not a country with one ethnic group and one language, as
has been the law for decades, but a place with a number of languages,
religions and ethnicities, in which Alevites, Kurds and Armenians
have struggled against campaigns of forced assimilation or outright
cleansing.
"Turkey took the heritage of the Ottoman Empire, and that was a
multicultural, multiethnic community, so we cannot neglect or ignore
these minorities," he said. "On the contrary, we accept them as part
of the richness of our culture."
This statement, which would be a bland platitude in North America
and much of Europe, marks a revolutionary change in Turkey's secular
establishment. It is still illegal to use the letters W, Q or X -
part of the Kurdish, but not the Turkish, alphabet. The CHP has
rigorously backed the law against "insulting Turkishness," which
has been used to imprison dissidents, including Kurds and Armenians,
who have dared suggest that Turkey's past included atrocities.
Much of this has changed under Mr. Erdogan, who has allowed the Kurdish
language to be spoken and opened a Kurdish-language public TV network;
has entered negotiations aimed at normalizing relations with Armenia;
and has sought a rapprochement with the leaders of Cyprus over the
Turkish-occupied province of North Cyprus.
This sense of dynamism inspired many otherwise secular-minded
Turks to back Mr. Erdogan's AKP, despite their discomfort with its
headscarf-wearing female MPs and attempts to restrict alcohol sales.
The CHP has offered little other than secularism, and a closed,
nationalistic culture and economy.
On the need to win people back from the AKP, Mr. Kilacdaroglu mades
his most shocking suggestion: that the party stop talking about
secularism all the time.
"I believe that to those people who have gone to the AKP, especially
the poor, we should not be emphasizing the principle of secularism,"
he said. "Their priority is to be able to feed themselves."
Mr. Kilacdaroglu said he isn't completely willing to move away from the
old ways: He spoke fervently about the need for government subsidies
and a less aggressive path toward European Union membership, But he
would reform the electoral system, allowing parties with less than
10 per cent of the vote to sit in power - a move, though he wouldn't
acknowledge this, whose main beneficiary would be the Kurdish party. It
would also hurt the AKP, which has won a strong Kurdish following.
If Mr. Kilacdaroglu is to have any chance in next year's elections,
he will have to give these new politics a voice. Polls show that
the CHP gained support after he took over the leadership, but still
lags behind. If he is to build on this sense of electoral novelty,
he may discover that his own startling narrative is his most potent
political weapon.
From: A. Papazian