On October 12, as pessimism regarding the American project to export democracy to Iraq was widening and deepening, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. These seemingly unrelated events sparked my interest in why it has not been the policy of the United States to promote Muslim Turkey as a democratic model for the Middle East. In Iraq, the task has been to create democracy. In Turkey, the challenge is far easier: to improve an existing democracy.

Pamuk has long been a critic of the imperfections and shortcomings of Turkish democracy—legal limitations on non-violent criticism of the Turkish state, the periodic intervention of the military in civilian affairs, the treatment of the Kurdish population and the denial of the Armernian genocide.

In December 2005, Pamuk, under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code (TPC), was brought before an Istanbul court and faced up to three years in prison for a comment published in the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger earlier in the year in which he was quoted as saying that “thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.”

Article 301 states that

1. Public denigration of Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and three years.
2. Public denigration of the Government of the Republic of Turkey, the judicial institutions of the State, the military or security structures shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months and two years.
3. In cases where denigration of Turkishness is committed by a Turkish citizen in another country the punishment shall be increased by one third.
4. Expressions of thought intended to criticize shall not constitute a crime.

While the charges against Pamuk were dropped in January 2006, he was but the latest in a long line of authors, journalists, publishers, human rights activists and academics charged and, in some instances, convicted under Article 301. Among them are Hrant Dink, a journalist and the editor of the Istanbul-published, Armenian-language weekly newspaper Agos; Sehmus Ulek, the Vice-President of the Turkish human rights NGO Mazlum Der; Ragip Zarakolu, publisher of a Turkish translation of a book by Dora Sakayan entitled Experiences of an Armenian Doctor: Garabet Hacheryan’s Izmir Journal; Faith Tas, a student of Communications and Journalism at Istanbul University and the owner of the Aram publishing house; Murat Pabuc, a lieutenant in the Turkish army who retired on grounds of disability;and Birol Duru, a journalist charged with “denigrating the security forces”.i

I have no pretensions about being a scholar on Turkey. But that’s not stopping me from trying to understand why the penal code of a country with many characteristics of a liberal democracy includes an article that is so restrictive of freedom of speech and so open to arbitrary interpretation by the courts. The explanation derives from the history of modern Turkey. Before turning to a brief review of that history, I apologize in advance to those of you already familiar with it and, even more so, to those who’s knowledge is far greater than mine. I certainly have no axes to grind when it comes to Turkey; any errors of fact or interpretation are purely accidental.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that one man—Kemal Ataturk—was responsible for the creation of modern, secular Turkey from the ashes of the post-World War I Ottoman Empire. I was familiar with Ataturk’s role, but it wasn’t until after I read some booksii that I became aware of the vast changes in Turkish society for which he’s responsible and the extent to which he’s worshiped as the father of his country. In comparison with Ataturk, George Washington is a relatively minor figure in American history.

Ataturk abolished the Office of the Ottoman Sultan, establishing popular sovereignty via representative democracy (1922); proclaimed the new Turkish state as a republic (1923); dismantled the office of the caliphate, closed Islamic courts, and shut down the religious education system (1924); decreed that European calendar replace the Muslim calendar (1925); and banned polygamy, permitted the marriage of Muslim women to non-Muslim men, and gave all adults the right to change their religion (1926). In the following decade, he granted full political rights to women, including eligibility for election to the parliament (1934); and completed the separation of government and religious affairs and the included of the principal of laicite (as in France) in the constitution (1937).

In a distant preview of a debate currently embroiling much of Europe and the Middle East, Ataturk, in the mid-1920s had this to say about the veil:iii

In some places I have seen women who put a piece of cloth or a towel or something like it over their heads to hide their faces, and who turn their backs or huddle themselves on the ground when a man passes by . . . What are the meaning and sense of this behavior? Gentlemen, can the mothers and daughters of a civilized nation adopt this strange manner, this barbarous posture? It is a spectacle that makes the nation an object of ridicule. It must be remedied at once.

Ataturk crushed the power of Islam in Turkey. In doing so, he obviously created many enemies among the religious. The backlash from his Westernizing influence, along with the efforts, including the use of violence, by the Kurds to create the independent Kurdistan that had been promised at Versailles in 1919 but subsequently ignored, is, I believe, the context for understanding, as distinct from approving, the felt need for Article 301.

In broad terms, Ataturk accomplished in Turkey what the U.S. set out to do by invading Iraq in 2003. The restrictions on individual liberties and the periodic use of the military to prevent the pendulum from swinging too far or too quickly in the direction of theocracy are the costs that have been borne by the Turkish people to maintain the secular state founded by Ataturk. Whether these restrictions, some of which have been lifted and softened by the Erdogan government elected in late 2002, are still necessary, is another question—one for which I don’t have an answer.

With the necessary background out of the way, I’ll now return to the question posed at the start of this post: Why is it that the U.S. hasn’t done everything in its power to position and portray Turkey as the beacon of light for the long-suffering peoples of the Middle East? There are, I believe, two answers, the first relating to Iraq and the second to the European Union (EU).

After 9/11 and the resulting realization of the threat posed by Islamic terrorists desirous of recreating a caliphate, there was nothing to prevent the U.S. from pointing to Turkey as proof that secularism, democracy and Islam could coexist in an overwhelmingly Muslim state.

But that wasn’t the role the Bush Administration had in mind for Turkey. Instead, as the policymakers in Washington were formulating their plans for the invasion of Iraq, they looked to Turkey—a NATO ally—as the staging area for an invasion of northern Iraq. The Administration’s efforts to enlist Turkey were widely reported, and until a short time before the American-led coalition’s invasion, it looked like the Turkish government would abide by Washington’s requests. For several months, then, other Muslim governments and their publics saw Muslim Turkey as aiding and abetting the West in planning an attack on another Muslim country. As this perception gained strength, the potential efficacy of depicting Turkey as the wave of the future for the Middle East evaporated.

In the end, of course, the Turkish parliament, on March 1, 2003, surprised both the Turkish and American governments by voting against allowing U.S. troops to enter northern Iraq from Turkish soil. The only concession to the U.S. was the opening of Turkish airspace to American warplanes, both to transport troops and to carry supplies. This totally unexpected recalcitrance resulted in the worst-of-all-possible outcomes for the U.S.: the possibility of using Turkey as the model for the reconstruction of Middle East governments and societies had been effectively eliminated, and Turkey’s participation in the Iraq war was far smaller and restricted than had been anticipated.

How does the EU fit into the picture? At a December 2002 meeting that would consider Turkey’s application for membership, the U.S. campaigned in Turkey’s favor, with Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense saying that “History suggests that a European Union that welcomes Turkey will be even stronger, safer and more richly diverse than it is today. The alternative, exclusionary choice is surely unthinkable.”

Europeans weren’t so sure. Most notably, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former French President who was then in charge of drafting the new EU constitution (that was to be rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005) told Le Monde that Turkey wasn’t a European country and that inviting it into the EU would mean “the end of Europe.” He raised the specter of Turkey’s rapidly growing population, saying it would quickly become “the biggest state in the EU . . . with the biggest bloc in the European Parliament.”

On December 12, the EU turned down Turkey’s bid to set a date to begin negotiations for membership. It agreed only to meet in December 2004 to decide whether Turkey had become sufficiently democratic and respectful of human rights to start negotiations. The New York Times reported that “By all accounts, the lobbying by the Bush Administration on behalf of Washington’s key Muslim ally in NATO did not help Turkey’s cause. The Europeans saw it as a cynical ploy to push for Turkey’s admission . . . in exchange for political support and access to military bases in a war against Iraq.” Turkish leaders suggested that the rejection might compel them “to turn their gaze to the East.”

By focusing on Turkey’s democratic and human rights shortcomings, the EU’s rejection of Ankara’s membership bid, along with subsequent public statements by European leaders to that effect, broadcast an image of Turkey that was a far cry from the one necessary to portray Turkey as the model for the future Middle East.

  1. Amnesty International USA.↩
  2. Stephen Kinzer, Crescent and Star; Andrew Mango, The Turks Today; Nicole and Hugh Pope, Turkey Unveiled.↩
  3. Crescent and Star, pp. 44-45.↩