A degree of Islamic rhetoric has been used to admonish Israel for its attack, writes NICHOLAS BIRCHin Istanbul
“THE MORE you pull the bowstring eastwards, the further you can shoot the arrow westwards.” It’s an image Turkey’s foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu likes to use when asked whether Turkey’s growing prominence in the Middle East is compatible with its position as a Nato member and candidate for the European Union.
Following Turkey’s vote against new economic sanctions against Iran at a United Nations security council meeting on Wednesday, and with Turkish politicians levelling ever harsher criticisms against Israel for its commando attack on a convoy bringing aid to Gaza, it is a claim being greeted with increasing scepticism, both in the West and in Turkey.
That didn’t have to be the case. On one level, Turkey’s new policy of “zero problems on our border” is a natural response to the end of the cold war. A loyal policeman of Nato’s eastern border since the end of the second World War, Turkey is now close friends with former Soviet-bloc neighbours such as Syria.
Turkey’s increased multilateralism also has an economic side. For years, its economy was tied to Europe, and Europe still takes the bulk of its exports. But the global crisis has left Turkish businessmen, particularly those in the conservative hinterland who form the backbone of support for the Justice and Development Party (AKP), looking for new markets less hard-hit than European ones.
In 2009, for the first time in its recent history, Konya, the central Anatolian industrial boom town where Mr Davutoglu was born in 1959, exported more goods to the Middle East than to Europe.
Speaking in London on Wednesday, meanwhile, US defence secretary Robert Gates laid the blame for Turkey’s increasing independence squarely on European states opposed to Turkey’s EU accession process, which has ground to an almost complete halt since it kicked off in 2005.
“I personally think that if there is anything to the notion that Turkey is, if you will, moving eastward, it is, in my view, in no small part because it was pushed, and pushed by some in Europe refusing to give Turkey the kind of organic link to the West that Turkey sought,” he said. Yet the AKP is the direct descendant of a party whose openly anti-Semitic Islamist prime minister, in the mid-1990s, staunchly opposed the West and advocated the formation of an Islamic union stretching across the Middle East.
Turkey’s current premier, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has always insisted he has “changed [his Islamist] shirt”. The tone and content of public speeches he has given since the Israeli raid has left some in Turkey wondering.
“Thou shalt not kill,” Mr Erdogan told cheering crowds in Konya on June 4th, repeating the injunction in Turkish, English and Hebrew before going on to describe Islam as the religion of peace. Famous for his considered statements and mild manners, meanwhile, Mr Davutoglu angrily described the Israeli raid as Turkey’s September 11th, leading one prominent analyst to ask whether his government would react as irrationally as George Bush’s did in 2001.
A professor of international relations at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, Soli Ozel is not convinced the vehemence of public responses to Israel is a sign Turkey is becoming more radical. Rather, he says, the issue has been hijacked by radicals who previously found it more difficult to make their voice heard.
“There is no doubt who is in the right on this issue,” Mr Ozel says. “But Turkish rhetoric became religious and ideological. A grief which should have been everybody’s became the monopoly of the Islamist movement.”
Strikingly, there is evidence AKP’s staunch support for Hamas is disturbing some Turkish conservatives too. In an interview given on June 5th to the Wall Street Journal, Fethullah Gulen, the reclusive head of Turkey’s most powerful religious group, based in the US for the last decade, said a Turkish charity’s failure to seek accord with Israel before attempting to deliver aid “is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters”. There has never been any love lost between political Islamists like Mr Erdogan and Fethullah Gulen, a more traditional conservative who openly supported a military campaign to oust the AKP’s more traditionally Islamist predecessor in 1997.
Since the run-up to the elections AKP won in 2002, however, in a break with its long-standing policy of spreading its political bets widely, Mr Gulen’s Movement, with an estimated three to six million supporters inside Turkey, has given full support to Mr Erdogan. Some see Mr Gulen’s June 5th warning as a sign the truce between Mr Gulen’s conservatives and the political Islamists who form the core of the AKP could be about to break.
A journalist who follows the Gulen Movement closely, Murat Yalniz sees it as evidence of Turkey’s increasing presence on the global stage. “Both Gulen and Erdogan are increasingly global brands,” he says. “Gulen tries to sell himself to the West as the face of ‘moderate Islam’. Erdogan increasingly seems to want to present himself as patron of the oppressed Muslim masses. The secret lies in finding a balance.”