(The Conversation) – For many years, it wasn’t the economy that determined voting behaviour in Turkey. The country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, won almost every election he contested despite a deteriorating economic outlook.

This is commonly explained by the importance of identity politics in a country that has been polarised by the policies of Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party over its 22 years in power.

However, Erdoğan’s streak came to a screeching halt on Sunday March 31 following Turkey’s local elections. His AK Party lost the popular vote for the first time since 2002 and the main opposition group claimed victory in key cities including Istanbul and Ankara.

The reason why this time was different lies in the huge accumulated costs from years of policy mistakes that are now beginning to bite in a serious way.

So, what was the economic outlook as the country went to the polls?

On March 21, Turkey’s central bank raised interest rates unexpectedly to 50%. The move was the latest in a succession of rate rises that have followed Erdoğan’s re-election as president in May 2023. It was viewed as evidence of the central bank’s determination to fight runaway inflation that is hovering close to 70%.

The rising interest rates have been widely applauded as a much-needed reversal from the unorthodox monetary policy that had gone on far too long. Erdoğan’s unconventional policy stance arose from his deep-held conviction that raising interest rates would increase inflation rather than reduce it.

The pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused inflation to soar worldwide. While almost every central bank raised interest rates in response, Turkey went on an interest rate cutting spree. Keeping rates artificially low contributed to the rise in domestic inflation, and has made Turkey an inflation champion on a par with Argentina and Venezuela.

Decoupling from other emerging economies

Emerging markets have been surprisingly resilient in the face of the global financial squeeze. Unlike in the past, many emerging economies have avoided huge fluctuations in their exchange rates, have not been subject to debt distress and have managed to keep inflation under control.

One reason for this is the success of emerging economies in improving their policy frameworks, particularly by enhancing the independence of their central banks. More specifically, central banks in these countries have significantly improved their communication and transparency, and have become much better at forecasting inflation. As such, countries including Chile, Czech Republic and South Africa have outperformed their counterparts in advanced economies.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Turkey inflation soars: Seniors suffer despite increase in pensions ”

Sadly, Turkey was an outlier in this sphere. The country has completely ditched the independence of its monetary policy to such an extent that its central bank has had six different governors in the last five years.

Politics has also played a disproportionate role in the making of economic policy. Changes to the Turkish constitution, which were put in place in 2018, gave Erdoğan significant executive powers to push for very generous spending ahead of the 2023 presidential elections.

Minimum wage rose substantially and costly pension schemes and subsidised housing projects were put in place. This expansion in public spending naturally contributed to the inflationary pressures that were already brewing.

Turkey’s outlier position in loose monetary policy, cutting rates between 2021 and 2023 while everyone else had been tightening, is the very reason why its central bank is now having to push rates up while others are just starting the easing cycle.

Why does this matter?

Getting monetary policy wrong matters for most countries. But it matters particularly for countries like Turkey that are highly open to trade and financial flows, and for whom exchange rate movements are a crucial source of fluctuation in the domestic economy.

One of the biggest losers of Erdoğan’s unorthodox monetary policy has been the Turkish lira. Over the past six years, the value of the lira has fallen dramatically against the US dollar. In January 2018, you would have needed to part with 3.76 liras to purchase one US dollar. Today, this figure stands at 31.9 liras.

Large fluctuations in the value of the lira matter for the Turkish economy for several reasons.

First, a significant part of Turkey’s imports are inputs used in the production process, particularly of vehicles, machinery and mechanical appliances that make up nearly half of the country’s exports. Any fall in the value of the lira will push up input costs and hence prices, reducing the competitiveness of the country’s exports.

Second, Turkey imports a substantial part of its energy from abroad. In much the same way, any depreciation of the lira will make it more expensive to import energy.

Third, Turkey is sitting on substantial external liabilities in foreign currency terms. This makes the depreciation of the lira even more costly. Any loss in its value magnifies the amount of resources required to repay a given level of foreign currency liabilities.

Moving forward

Turkey’s return to more orthodox economic policy is good news. But it is so overdue that even the sharp reversals in policy have not been sufficient to turn the tide on its economy, especially in the fight against inflation. Persistent inflationary pressures have forced citizens to increase their holdings of foreign currency, which has put further pressure on the lira.

Facing a slowdown in foreign capital inflows, the authorities have had to burn significant amounts of foreign currency reserves to prevent the lira from depreciating further. The sharp rise in interest rates on March 21 should be seen in a similar vein and as the price the country is having to pay for its past policy mistakes.

More importantly, it has been nearly a year since Turkey returned to more conventional economic policy and there is no plan for a restructuring of the economy with proper institutional reform at its core. If proof is needed as to whether robust and independent policy institutions benefit economic performance, you need look no further than the recent resilience of other emerging economies.

Brazil, for example, hasn’t only rebounded strongly from the pandemic. It has managed to control inflation and boasts one of the best performing currencies in the world.

Gulcin Ozkan, Professor of Finance, King’s College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It was the best opposition performance since the late 1970s

( Globalvoices.org ) – Turkey’s local elections which took place on March 31, will go down in history as one of its most surprising. Turkey’s demoralized opposition, namely the [secular] Republican People’s Party (CHP), dominated in what many pundits described as the ruling [center-right] Justice and Development Party’s worst defeat of its 22-year existence. For the first time since 1977, the CHP took more votes nationwide. In his televised address afterward, the CHP leader Özgür Özel called the elections “historic” as he teared up. Scores of supporters took to the streets to celebrate the results across Turkey.

Istanbul, where CHP secured victory in 2019, was one of the key cities in this year’s race. At the time, losing control over the municipality in Istanbul was described as a major blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development party (AKP), as it was where he started his political career when he was elected mayor in 1994. The results of yesterday’s election nationwide cemented this rejoinder on Erdoğan’s agenda.

In the capital, Ankara, the CHP’s incumbent mayor, Mansur Yavaş, outdid his rival by over 28 percent. In Turkey’s third-largest city, Izmir, opposition candidate Cemil Tugar finished 11 points ahead of the ruling party’s candidate.

Elsewhere across the country, as the results were trickling in, the map was slowly turning red as many of the provinces previously led by the AKP were showing victories for the opposition party candidates.

According to Gönül Tol, Director of the Middle East Institute’s Turkish Program, the change was “notable,” as “opposition CHP [was] not confined to coastal regions but expanding into Anatolia, the conservative/nationalist heartland of the country.”

In total, the opposition won in 35 out of 81 provinces. The rest of the provinces were split between AKP (24 provinces), the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM, 10 provinces), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP, 8 provinces), the New Welfare Party (two provinces), and Iyi Party (Good Party, one province). With some six million eligible voters, the turnout at the time of writing this story was estimated at more than 78 percent across the country’s 81 provinces, with almost all ballots counted. In previous municipal elections, the turnout was 84.5 percent. In Turkey, the voter turnout has always been high ranging between 70 and 90 percent throughout the years.

This victory also reversed political tides ahead of the next general elections scheduled for 2028. There were hints the AKP would be making constitutional changes which could allow incumbent President Erdoğan to stay in power, despite earlier promises these elections would be his last.

While the president cannot legally run in the next presidential race in 2028, according to Turkey’s Constitution, there are two scenarios in which this can change. In the first scenario, Erdoğan and the AKP would need to secure 400 votes in the parliament to change the constitution. Turkey’s parliament, the Grand National Assembly, consists of 600 seats. At the moment, the AKP and its main ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), hold 313 seats. Thus, pushing for a constitutional amendment with a parliamentary vote would largely depend on whether the ruling party and President can secure the support of other political party representatives.

In the second scenario, the parliament can call for an early election. But even in this scenario, 360 parliamentary votes are needed.

With election results in, these plans will likely be put on hold.

While still low, the number of women mayors also increased, rising from four to 11. In Bilecik, a provincial capital of Turkey’s Bilecik Province, in northwestern Anatolia, Melek Mızrak Subaşı who was likened to Daenerys Targaryen, the fictional character in George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire — which was later made into the HBO blockbuster Game of Thrones series, also secured victory.

The elections also saw instances of violence. At least one person was killed and 11 injured in the city of Diyarbakir, and at least sixteen were injured in the province of Sanliurfa, according to media reports.

Critiques against Erdoğan

As results started to trickle in, one of the widely discussed questions was what kind of election results Turkey would see had it been a different opposition candidate running against President Erdoğan.

The local election results also illustrated that the dynamics between the local and general elections were different. Turkey’s ongoing economic crisis, wherein the country’s currency lost 40 percent of its value since last year and over 80 percent in the last five years, did matter, and the voters placed the blame on the ruling government in the local elections. In an interview with Reuters, Hakan Akbaş, a senior adviser at the Albright Stonebridge Group, said, “The economy was the decisive factor. Turkish people demanded change and İmamoğlu is now the default nemesis to President Erdoğan.”

Another surprising result came from the Yeniden Refah (the New Welfare Party), a religious-conservative party which pundits speculated could divide the AKP’s votes among conservative and religious voters disillusioned by Erdoğan’s economic choices. It came third in the race after the ruling AKP secured over  six percent of votes.

In his balcony speech delivered past midnight, Erdoğan adopted a less divisive tone than usual, expressing his gratitude to all of his party candidates as well as the people. He also said the party would fix mistakes ahead of the 2028 general elections. Unlike in previous municipal elections in 2019, the ruling party also did not contest election results, with Erdoğan, saying he and his party accept the people’s decision. In 2019, after the CHP’s Ekrem İmamoğlu won against the AKP’s Binali Yıldırım, the latter objected to the results. In the re-run, İmamoğlu won with an even higher margin — some 860,000 votes versus 13,700 votes.

In securing his re-election, İmamoğlu now has a clear shot at becoming the next leader of the opposition CHP as well as a likely candidate in the next presidential race. According to Sinan Ülgen, director of the Istanbul-based Edam think tank, “This outcome has certainly been a watershed for İmamoğlu. He will emerge as the natural candidate of the opposition for the next round of presidential elections.” Whether İmamoğlu will succeed remains to be seen, especially as the popular Istanbul Mayor is still facing a charge over allegedly insulting public officials in a speech he made after he won Istanbul’s municipal election in 2019. The higher appeals court must uphold the verdict, but until then, İmamoğlu remains Istanbul’s mayor.

Also important to note is that these elections were free but not fair. Ahead of the vote, Erdoğan relied heavily on his presidential powers as well as the government institutions and media. In a country where 90 percent of traditional media is controlled by the government, it was not surprising to see that much of the air time was devoted to the ruling party and its candidates. There was plenty of disinformation, as was the case during the general elections last year. In December 2023, the Information Technologies and Communications Authority (BTK), Turkey’s top telecommunications watchdog, imposed an access ban on 16 VPN providers. The country has also witnessed a backsliding on human rights, democracy, judicial independence, and the rule of law.

Featured image: Tons of CHP supporters took to the streets after their surprise victory in Turkey’s election. Collage by Arzu Geybullayeva.

Written byArzu Geybullayeva

Via Globalvoices.org

At a science awards ceremony in the capital Ankara, Erdogan said: “How do you [Netanyahu] differ from Hitler? These [actions] will make us look for Hitler as well. Is there anything Netanyahu does that is less than Hitler? No.”

Just like 80 years ago in Nazi Germany, Erdogan said that today, scholars worldwide who have the courage to decry the oppression and persecution in Gaza are facing pressure and threats, referring to academics in the US and elsewhere being fired or censured for standing up for Palestinians.

Sky News Australia “Turkish President compares Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler”

For scholars who face pressure for defending human dignity in Gaza, the doors of Turkish universities are open, he stressed.”We realised that the institutions that talk big and spend big budgets are completely hollow when it comes to Israel and its atrocities,” the president said.”From the UN Security Council to press organisations, from the EU to journalist groups, all institutions that serve as apostles of democracy have failed,” he said.

Not only international organisations, but also the prestigious Western universities have failed on the Gaza issue, Erdogan added.

Israel launched a massive military campaign on the Gaza Strip on 7 October, killing at least 21,110 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring 55,243 others, according to local health authorities.

The onslaught has left Gaza in ruins, with 60 per cent of the enclave’s infrastructure damaged or destroyed and nearly two million people displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicines.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Middle East Monitor

Maybe decades ago this statement had some truth to it, but it is outdated and irrelevant in today’s geopolitical climate. Israel is bookended by the two most powerful military states in the region, Egypt and Turkey, which are also many times more populous than the Jewish-majority state. Turkey, as a NATO member, has long had diplomatic relations with Israel, with which it does vigorous bilateral trade, including in weapons. Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel that has held since 1979, and the two countries engage in extensive military consultations. The Israeli campaign against Gaza since October 7 has done nothing to change all this.

Many Israelis believe that “ceding the Sinai was a mistake that will cost us dearly one day when Egyptian army divisions cross the Suez Canal into the Sinai and attack Israel”  The contrary is obviously true. By relinquishing its occupation of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and removing any sense of grievance toward Tel Aviv on the part of Cairo, Israel secured decades of peace on its western border.

Egypt, a military power ranked the 14^th strongest in the world, was on a war footing with the new neighboring country of Israel from 1948 through the mid-1970s. Yet, the relationship between the two military powers has been increasingly amicable in recent times due to many internal and external factors, including a common interest in quelling insurgencies in the strategic Sinai.

At the establishment of the Israeli state back in 1948, Egypt was one of the most vehement enemies of the newly founded nation, participating and often taking a leading role in the wars and skirmishes that unfolded in 1948, 1956, and 1967. However, by the late 1970s Egypt and Israel had begun to work on their relationship, especially through the Camp David Accords in 1978 that led to the signing of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty in 1979. Facilitated by former US president Jimmy Carter, this treaty established diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations between the two states. 

Despite some fluctuations in the relationship between the two countries in the ensuing decades, the relationship became even more important with the rise of strongman Abdelfattah El-Sisi to power in 2014; His rise to power led to stronger ties to the Israeli state, given that both opposed the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot, Hamas, as well as the ISIL terrorist organization.

Since the rise of the pro-Islam Justice and Development Party (AKP) from 2002, Israeli analysts have had some trepidation about Türkiye, a country that boasts a military power ranked at 11 in the world. Türkiye, long ruled by a militantly secular military junta, whether directly or behind the scenes, has increasingly made a place for Muslim devotion and a Muslim inflection of politics, though the secular constitution remains so far untouched. The long rule of Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s current president, has seen the AKP express support for Hamas and lambaste Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. In an article posted by The Jerusalem Post back in 2020, the newspaper’s editorial team claimed that Türkiye was a major threat to Israel and that any “Attempts to reconcile with Turkey have failed, and Ankara is now increasingly drunk on militarism and willingness to use force to get what it wants.”

In contrast to Egypt, Türkiye was one of the first nations with a Muslim majority to acknowledge the existence of the Israeli state and to establish diplomatic ties with the country. During Israel’s first two decades the two nations became strong allies and participated in military, economic, and financial collaborations.

The relationship between the two countries became strained in the late 2000s because of two incidents. In late 2008 Israel attacked on Gaza bwithout informing Türkiye beforehand. Then, even more seriously, in 2010 Israeli commandos attacked the Turkish humanitarian ship Mavi Marmara that was headed to Gaza, resulting in the deaths of 9 Turks and 1 Turkish-American.

Still, starting in 2020, the relationship between the two nations was on a corrective path with Israel President Herzog visiting Ankara in 2022 to discuss Energy deals between the two and to encourage stronger economic and trade ties.

The New Africa Channel: “Egyptian President Al Sisi says Palestine must be recognized as a state to end Israel Gaza war ”

Post-October 7^th, the relationship between these two regional powers and Israel saw, understandably, a shift in tone. Yet, it’s not a shift that endangers Israeli policy, much less Israeli’s existence. Both Türkiye and Egypt along with most Arab states and many countries of the global South have condemned Israel’s response to the Hamas-led attacks, which has resulted in over 15.000 deaths in the Strip. None of these countries, however, have shown any interest in military interference, or a hostile approach. 

From Egypt’s perspective, ties with with Israel are largely undisturbed. The main tension has arisen over Israel’s pressuring of Egypt to open its border with Gaza at Rafah and to accept large numbers of Palestinian refugees. According to Egypt, such massive Palestinian displacement is a contravention of humanitarian law. Cairo is afraid, more importantly, that such a huge refugee population would endanger Egypt’s already struggling economy and would cause some serious threats to the country’s security.

Hence, Egypt’s stance on the issue had nothing to do with hostility toward Israel, but was defensive in nature, showing a profound concern about policies that threatened to harm its security.

In Türkiye’s case, after the October 7^th attacks the country was ready to help mediate the situation. In an effort to take the first step, Erdogan decided to ask Hamas’ political wing, who were in his country at that moment, to leave. However, the tone of Turkiye’s stance slowly began to change as Israel inflicted more and more casualties on the Palestinians of Gaza, to the extent that Erdogan began branding the campaign a genocide.

Erdogan expressed himself more and more virulently toward Israel’s conduct of the war. In one post, Erdogan pledged that “As Türkiye, we will continue to work for a humanitarian ceasefire and then for the establishment of lasting stability.” Yet shortly thereafter, in his speech at the COP28 UN climate summit in Dubai, Erdogan called Israel’s actions “ war crimes.”  In a recent speech he branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “the Butcher of Gaza” and predicted he would be tried in the Hague, as Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was. Despite Erdogan’s vehement rhetoric, however, trade with Israel continues unimpeded, even trade in weaponry.

To conclude, despite a checkered relationship between Israel and the two regional powers of Turkey and Egypt, Israel’s claim that it is pitted in the Middle East alone against a swarm of enemies is unfounded and misleading. While enemies of the Israeli state unmistakably exist, opposition to Israeli policies and their mistreatment of Palestinians does not equate to a call for Israel’s destruction. The change in both Türkiye and Egypt’s rhetoric toward Israel constitutes a critique of in Israel’s policies. The biggest and best-armed countries in the region other than Israel itself have remained uneasy economic and security partners for Tel Aviv throughout this crisis.

Small clashes over the issue continued on Monday in Tel Aviv and other cities. Far right wing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu condemned the secular protesters as “leftists” demonstrating “hatred” for “Jewish” worshipers.

Last fall, as it became clear that they would be a swing bloc in the just-elected Netanyahu government, Ultra-Orthodox parties demanded authorization of gender segregation in public. They want women to sit at the back of the buses that go through religious areas, want to segregate state educational institutions by gender, and want separate seating for women and men at government-funded entertainment events.

Tel Aviv is a largely secular-minded city in which such ideas are anathema, and often elicit real anger. The city’s inhabitants understand that the Ultra-Orthodox are not merely engaged in special pleading for permission to perform their sectarian lifestyle in the big city but are preparing the ground to impose gender segregation, as what they see as a key Jewish religious practice, on all Israelis.

As a Middle East expert, I find this dispute reminiscent of struggles over gender segregation in Muslim societies.

Turkish intellectuals fear that President Tayyip Erdogan will try to set up all-women universities. Such institutions, which exist in Saudi Arabia, don’t serve women as well as their proponents think. For instance, they often don’t have professional schools because there aren’t a sufficient mass of women students planning to go into those fields. Or, their quality will never stack up against the male institutions, consigning women to second-class status in those fields.

Didem Unal argues that because of the political alliances Erdogan made with right wing religious parties this spring in the run-up to elections, they “pressured AKP to adopt a hardliner position against ‘gender ideology,’ which they vaguely define to link different reactionary agendas against progressive gender politics. They specifically demanded the annulment of Law No. 6284 on the Protection of the Family and Combating Domestic Violence and women’s right to alimony, the closing down of LGBTI+ associations, and the introduction of an Islamist education system and built their election propaganda on these demands. Despite some female AKP actors’ objections, whom I describe as “softliners” …. senior male AKP officials implied that these demands can be met and that AKP has nothing to contradict the political agendas of these parties.”

American Muslim women also mounted a protest beginning over a decade ago against being confined to a constrained space in mosques.

Of course, other religions, such as Hinduism in India, often practice forms of gender segregation, as well. In fact, Indian women suffer from various forms of gender segregation — familial and occupational included.

So these disputes are not limited to Judaism and Islam. In the latter two, they appear to be exacerbated by secular modernism, which argues for the equality of all individuals under the law, regardless of race, religion or gender. Israel, because of the prevailing Zionist ideology, however, already rejects the equality of Israelis of Palestinian heritage. A carve-out for discriminating against Jewish women would just be one more rejection of what Netanyahu calls “leftism” by Israeli society. Such moves appeal to men who feel that modernity has detracted from their power and authority. Such insecure, fragile men who must build themselves up by subordinating women, are a key constituency for Netanyahu and his extremist parties, just as they are for Erdogan and his in Turkey.

Where such patriarchal counter-reformations are taken to an extreme, we get the Taliban regime of Afghanistan.

Public intellectuals’ unwillingness to own faults entrenches Erdogan’s rule

Written bySinan Ciddi

 

 

( Globalvoices.org ) – The sources of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s power are vast. In his over twenty years of rule, he has consolidated power to build himself a loyal bureaucratic system (including the military and law enforcement), a compliant mainstream media landscape, and a government system that positions his dictates above any notion of oversight. Added to this is the lack of a credible political opposition field that could offer voters a credible alternative to Erdoğan.

This much is known and well-documented. Therefore, when curious observers ask, “Why did Erdoğan win the 2023 presidential elections?” The answer is usually conveyed in a mixture of the reasons cited above. Meanwhile, the elephant in the room — namely, the country’s opposition intelligentsia — is left unaddressed. 

Image by Arzu Geybullayeva

What the intelligentsia failed to do 

Turkey’s intelligentsia is broad and diverse. But the most recent general elections also showed its demoralizing effect on public opinion. Ahead of and during the general elections held in Turkey in May 2023, many of the influential opposition media outlets, with their commentators and journalists, were in a state of euphoria. Many respected analysts abandoned their objective analytical toolkits and lenses to cheer for the main opposition candidate who ran against Erdoğan: Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy was essentially forced upon the public by Kılıçdaroğlu himself and his narrow group of political operators, with little debate, public input, let alone any analysis to determine whether he was indeed the best candidate to defeat Erdoğan in what many described as the country’s most crucial election. 

Instead, the opposition intelligentsia helped to cement a widespread view that Kılıçdaroğlu was the man to defeat Erdoğan. Meanwhile, those who questioned this decision were cast out as pariahs who could not read the writing on the wall. Seasoned analysts would engage in targeted campaigns that declared that the Erdoğan era was finished and he had no chance of surviving reelection.

This certainty was based on what Rusen Cakir, the editor of Medyascope, constantly referred to as a “governance crisis” by Erdoğan. This “governance crisis” was based on the premise that Erdoğan failed to deliver meaningful solutions to the most pressing economic and political problems the country and voters were facing. Cakir was not alone in this message. Other veteran analysts and observers would join his weekly broadcasts, assuming that their conversations with ordinary voters and attendance at his Republican People’s Party (CHP) campaign rallies were clear signs the Erdoğan era was at its near end.

One veteran journalist and Kılıçdaroğlu advocate, Kadri Gursel, went as far as to say that those who could not see the coming tidal wave were not only uninformed but might not really want Erdoğan out of office! Similar commentaries paid scant attention to alternative analyses: namely that Erdoğan’s image may be tarnished, but he had significant structural advantages arising from incumbency (outlined in the first paragraph) that may help him stay in power.

In the end, the skeptics got it right. What is troubling is that, while the predictions of journalists, pollsters, and analysts can be wrong, it was the marginalizing tone and the refusal to take critical analyses that presented credible alternative scenarios to the public into account.

Almost three months since the election,  these pundits,  rather than acknowledging that they misled the public, have only accepted that they were wrong and that it was time to move on and remain optimistic.

The impact

The wider failure of public intellectuals is twofold: first, raising the expectations of people who looked up to their analysis and were utterly demoralized by the election outcomes. Second is their hand-wringing — they have shrugged off any responsibility for how their analysis was short-sighted.

Analysts have a duty to the Turkish public they influence by providing all the information they are entitled to. Of course, their analyses can be proven wrong, in part or in whole. What would have been valuable in this election cycle was for respected and popular independent outlets to focus on a variety of electoral outcome scenarios, a critical look at why the Kılıçdaroğlu campaign and candidacy were lackluster, and a keener focus on the existing strengths of Erdoğan’s state apparatus that prevented a genuinely competitive election.

Instead, we got a misinformation behemoth wherein the vast majority of Turkey’s pro-Erdoğan media spread misinformation, seemingly joined by opposition media outlets that willfully misrepresented the range of possible outcomes that could come to bear. Both helped serve Erdoğan’s interests. However, only the latter is responsible for the sense of demoralization, apathy, and public anger that has since ensued. The Turkish public deserves better from those who claim to speak truth to power. 

 

 

Written bySinan Ciddi

Via Globalvoices.org

In north-east Syria, the 12-year conflict is far from over. Russian fighter jets buzz US surveillance drones, threatening to bring them down. Iranian-backed militias occasionally fire rockets at US positions. The Assad regime maintains that it will “regain every inch” of Syria, ending Kurdish autonomy in the north-east.

Meanwhile Turkey — considering the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) to be part of the Turkish Kurdish insurgency PKK — carries out periodic strikes, following its seizure of part of the border area in October 2019. And the Islamic State, expelled from its last village is March 2019, is still present. Its cells attack civilians and the Assad regime’s military buses, killing at least 23 troops on August 11.

In a multi-sided confrontation where — amid the regime’s deadly repression — no one has “won”, the headline is of a possible Russian-Iranian-US showdown. But that is a diversion from a local story where Syria’s Kurds could be the biggest losers in the north-east.

On July 16, a Russian Su-35 fighter jet flew close to a US MC-12 turboprop surveillance aircraft, flying in support of operations against Islamic State cells. American officials said the MC-12’s four crew members were endangered, and added that Russian harassment had complicated strike against an IS leader earlier in July. Moscow disregarded the message.

On July 23, another Russian fighter jet damaged a US MQ-9 Reaper drone, carrying our surveillance over northern Syria, when it flew within a few metres and one of its flares struck the Reaper’s propeller. A drone operator kept the Reaper in the air and guided it home.

Lt. General Alex Grynkewich, commander of the 9th Air Force, said: “We call upon the Russian forces in Syria to put an immediate end to this reckless, unprovoked, and unprofessional behaviour.” Some analysts seized on the incidents to declare imminent confrontation. Citing movements of Iranian-backed militia and Assad regime troops and equipment as well as Russian harassment, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War declared: “Iran, Russia, and the Syrian regime are coordinating to expel US forces from Syria.”

Despite a de facto “deconfliction” arrangement with US forces, Russia has discussed operations with Iran to prop up the Assad regime throughout the Syrian conflict. But ISW’s assessment is hyperbolic. The chair of the US Joint Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley, said in July that additional military deployments were not needed to fend off Russian harassment: “There’s been an uptick, but I wouldn’t overstate it too much. We’ve got adequate capabilities to defend ourselves.”

Equally important, assessments such as ISW’s play down – or even ignore completely – what is actually happening on the ground in Syria in favour of focusing on the interplay between foreign powers. Specifically, attention to a US-Russian-Iranian confrontation ignores the group at greatest risk in any showdown: Syria’s Kurdish population.

A people without a home

In 2015, the prospect was of an Islamic State caliphate across northern Syria. IS controlled about one-third of the country, with the prospect of further gains. But the Kurds, backed by US military assistance, held out. They repelled a four-month siege of Kobane by IS in January 2015, at the cost of thousands of lives, and then began the fightback to reclaim territory.

Raqqa, Syria’s seventh-largest city and the centre of the caliphate, was liberated in October 2017. The following September, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Council declared the establishment of a statelet, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).

But autonomy would inevitably be tenuous for a Kurdish population — estimated at between 30 and 45 million — struggling for decades for a state in Syria, Iran, Iraq or Turkey. The Assad regime, which suppressed Kurdish protests in 2004-05, was anxious to regain authority that it had lost after nationwide demonstrations began in March 2011.

Tehran’s regime not only chafed at US-supported Kurdish forces but also had its own problematic relations with Kurds in northwest Iran. Turkey’s Erdoğan government, because of its internal fight with the PKK, was also dedicated to breaking the Kurdish areas.

Ankara came close to doing so. Having already overrun the Afrin canton in north-west Syria in 2016, Erdoğan sought an opening to advance in the north and north-east. He got it from Donald Trump, who offered in phone calls in December 2018 and October 2019 to withdraw all US troops. The Pentagon checked Trump on the first occasion, but Erdoğan seized on the second “green light” to launch a cross-border invasion, occupying a strip along the border.

Do “The Kurds Always Lose in the End”?

In April 2013, at an international gathering in Oxford in the UK, a US military officer told me: “I can’t see us maintaining a presence. The Kurds always lose in the end.”

More than a decade later, about 900 US troops remain in Syria, many of them working with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. But Erdoğan is watching, waiting, and saying that the Kurds must capitulate. Assad still insists that he should be the leader of the north-east.

As Iran fences with the US over sanctions and Tehran’s nuclear program, Iranian-backed militias occasionally fire rockets at US positions. And Russia — entangled in what appears to be Vladimir Putin’s losing gamble in Ukraine — pursues Syrian “pinpricks” against the Americans, hoping that Washington will finally abandon the Kurds.

On August 4, as political and military analysts were watching Russia and the US, there was another statement from northeast Syria. A day earlier, a Turkish drone strike on a car killed four members of the Syrian Democratic Forces and wounded two.

The Kurdish-led AANES called on the US to take a public position over the Turkish attacks which have killed dozens of Syrian Kurdish fighters this year. Washington must “have a clear stance … regarding the targeting of our people and fighters”.

There was no immediate reaction from either the US military or the Biden administration.

Scott Lucas, Professor, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Turkey’s rapid deterioration into full-blown authoritarianism is rooted in more than recent anti-democratic trends.

( Waging Nonviolence ) – Despite initial skepticism regarding the results of the November 2002 general elections — which saw the decimation of the incumbent coalition and veteran politicians by the newcomer Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — Western pundits soon hailed Turkey as a model for the rest of the Islamic world, an inspiring example of how Islam can be combined with secular democracy and market capitalism.

But the optimism inherent in considering Erdoğan’s Turkey as a model to emulate in a post-Arab Spring context proved to be short-lived, as demonstrated by a series of political crises including corruption scandals, country-wide protest movements, a failed military coup, the escalation of the conflict with Kurdish separatists, societal polarization exacerbated by uncontrolled immigration and, last but certainly not the least, brutal repression of all forms of dissent.

The failure of the Turkish model cannot be explained solely in terms of unrealistic expectations. The rapid deterioration of Turkey into full-blown authoritarianism is also a manifestation of a broader, global trend of what political scientists call “democratic backsliding.” As documented by Freedom House, 2021 marked the 15th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. With a global freedom score of 32 out of 100, Turkey is categorized as “not free.” In the Global Democracy Index report, Turkey is labelled as a “hybrid democracy” characterized by the following features: elections have irregularities that prevent them from being free and fair; corruption is widespread; the rule of law and civil society is weak; and media and the judiciary are not independent.

But how did Turkey get here? What accounts for the meteoric fall from grace of what was once considered a success story? To what extent is the deterioration of democracy in Turkey related to the global rise of authoritarianism? And how do domestic factors, notably nationalism and religion, factor in?

From empire to nation-state

Modern Turkey emerged out of an imperial order in which the main line of demarcation was religious affiliation. The salience of religion was buttressed by the social and political organization of the empire into legally recognized, culturally autonomous religious communities — the millet system. This partially decentralized system granted some internal autonomy to Ottoman communities, but their relative autonomy did not amount to some form of multiculturalism avant la lettre, as some commentators have later argued. On the contrary, the system guaranteed social and cultural segregation, regulating interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims and ensuring that intermixing was restricted.

From the beginning of the 19th century, the Ottoman empire began to decline militarily and economically. The Young Turks, who took over the empire after the 1908 rebellion, joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers and collapsed in the subsequent defeat at the hands of the Allies, which also led to the occupation of İstanbul and İzmir. The humiliation and exigencies of this defeat triggered a profound psychological trauma for the Ottoman elites. This prompted the formation of a strong nationalist movement with a vision of a modern nation-state, the blueprint for republican Turkey. In 1922, after a successful military campaign against the victorious Western military forces that later became the cornerstone of the foundational story of contemporary Turkey, a newly founded parliament officially ended 623 years of Ottoman rule. The following year the Republic of Turkey was formally created, with Ankara as its capital and the charismatic war hero Mustafa Kemal (later bestowed with the surname Atatürk, or the “father of Turks”) as president.

Ruptures and continuities

The founding elite was determined to distance the new state from its predecessor as it deemed a clean break with the Ottoman past necessary for its nation-building project. Post-imperial identity embraced Western modernity across the whole spectrum of daily life, from the mundane (the adoption of a new dress code, the introduction of the international Gregorian calendar, etc.) to the official (the replacement of the God-given sharia law by a civil code, the closure of religious convents, etc.), and it was premised on a number of foundational myths: of an embattled nation threatened by both internal and external enemies; of the need to prioritize the nation at the expense of individual and group rights; and, ultimately, of democracy. Despite its claim to be all-encompassing, hence “civic,” republican nationalism had a strong ethnic color from the outset as it placed particular emphasis on culture, and privileged the dominant Turkish element.

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Their self-avowed commitment to modernism and secularism notwithstanding, the republican leadership was aware of the strength of Islam, and sought to take advantage of it. This paradox of rejecting religion in principle yet embracing its potential in practice was to have a lasting legacy on social and political life. On the one hand, Islam, seen as a link with a past from which republican elites were trying to dissociate themselves, had to be symbolically downgraded. On the other hand, its appeal as a mobilizing force, a factor of social cohesion and a cultural resource for the new national narrative, not to mention its function as a boundary excluding what were deemed to be “non-Turkifiable” minorities, was hard to deny. The solution to this conundrum was to place religion under the purview of the state. Although in theory Islam was defined as a strictly private affair, in practice it was transformed into yet another state apparatus dedicated to the colonization of everyday life and the inculcation of a statist paternalistic logic.

Contrary to the commonplace view that the establishment of the Republic banished Islam to the margins of Turkish social and cultural life, republican nationalism and its definition of Turkishness drew heavily on Sunni Islam, and the systematic process of “Turkification” on which the new elites embarked involved measures that discriminated against non-Muslim minorities and subsequently heterodox Muslim minorities such as the Alevis. It can thus be argued that Islam, despite — or perhaps because of — its subsumption to the state, became a dominant ethnic and national idiom, a privileged and highly important signifier of Turkishness.

Nationalism and Islam

The transition of Turkey into multiparty politics in the 1950s marked the beginning of a new era that saw the transformation of Islam into a language of protest and discontent. Sects and religious orders re-emerged, influencing the agenda of opposition parties which, for example, promised the restoration of the Arabic call to prayer in response to popular demand. Despite the continued claims of the political elites that republican nationalism remained the guiding principle of the Turkish political system, the rehabilitation of religion became a prevalent feature of conservative politics which relied on Islam as a force for political mobilization.

State paternalism, which was reflected in the state’s attitude towards Islam, was inspired by a mistrust of the very people whose sovereignty the Republic was supposed to represent. Thus it envisaged a strenuous process of social engineering, to enlighten the people and “save” them from the clutches of tradition, and the establishment of formally democratic, but in essence authoritarian, political institutions that would safeguard the unity and modernization of Turkey. Thus, in instances where democracy was considered to be testing the boundaries of accepted political behavior, the national interest acquired priority over popular will, and was used to justify frequent interventions in the democratic process.

The reintegration of Islam into definitions of Turkishness during the 1950s and ‘60s informed the so-called Turkish model until the end of the 20th century, albeit kept in check by a formally secular state. During this time, Turkey was described as what several commentators called a “tutelary democracy,” in which individual and collective rights were always supposed to take second place to the national interest. In this visualization of modern Turkey, the nation was equated to an undivided people with a single sense of purpose. This entailed the “othering” of those who were believed to constitute a threat to national unity, be they non-Muslims, Kurds, Alevis or other minorities.

This binary divide between mythical nation and actual people survived the demise of tutelary democracy and became one of the defining features of Erdoğan’s rule. The earlier, more instrumental, synthesis of Islam and Turkishness has not been radically overhauled. True, Islam has emerged out of the margins, become more assertive and visible, yet it has still remained mainly a tool of mobilization and legitimation, controlled and shaped by the state, which considers it part and parcel of its particular “national vision.”

The ‘New Turkey’

In post-Kemalist Turkey, democracy began to be narrowly conceptualized as a process in which competitive elections became the sole source of legitimacy and the expression of the national will: a formula for empowering populism. The war of maneuvers between the AKP and the military/state bureaucracy and other contenders for power thus led the AKP to develop into a counter-institution displaying many characteristics of its opponents, including the creation of a personality cult around its leader, Erdoğan. The party progressively established its own control over key agencies of the state apparatus and resisted calls for internal democratization. Somewhat ironically then, despite the downfall of the Kemalist state, Erdoğan’s “New Turkey” turned out to be a less secular replica of the old regime.

This was by no means a foregone conclusion. There were times, in particular in the first, pragmatic, phase of AKP rule, which lasted roughly until 2010, when hopes for the emergence of a truly democratic order were stronger. The AKP even launched an initiative to resolve the country’s longstanding Kurdish problem, the so-called “democratic opening” process. It is true that the reforms the state undertook were more cosmetic than concrete; the process itself top-down, opaque and subject to the whims of two strongmen, Erdoğan and Abdullah Öcalan, the incarcerated leader of the Kurdish separatist PKK (Kurdish Workers Party). Still, the ceasefire between Turkish armed forces and the PKK lasted more than two years, and many believed that the process was irreversible.

These hopes were dashed in 2013 when a peaceful sit-in held by environmental activists on May 28 to counter government plans to raze Gezi Park in the symbolic Taksim Square escalated into a country-wide protest movement that was brutally suppressed by the state and its security apparatus. The fear that has been the hallmark of the second, ideological, phase of AKP rule has been exacerbated by the bitter feud between the government and the Gülen Movement; the deteriorating situation in Syria and the declaration of autonomy in Northern Syria by the PKK’s sister organization, the Democratic Union Party; and a series of terrorist attacks in various Turkish cities allegedly perpetrated by the Islamic State.

The simmering tensions boiled over when a small clique within the Turkish army attempted to topple the government on July 15, 2016, leaving 241 dead and an even stronger “strongman” behind. A state of emergency that gave extra powers to the government and the president was declared, and it was followed by an immense wave of arrests and detentions that extended far beyond those individuals allegedly linked to the Gülen movement, the “mastermind” behind the putsch according to the official narrative.

Statist communalism

It is commonplace to talk about Erdoğan’s “New Turkey” in terms of “the return of religion” or the failure of top-down secularization in a predominantly Muslim society. But this does not capture the fundamental continuity between Kemalist and post-Kemalist Turkey. Erdoğan’s unabashedly Islamist regime has more affinities with the modern-secular nation-state Mustafa Kemal and his associates were trying to build than its proponents are prepared to admit. It is equally based on a notion of strong leadership and the personality cult that goes with it, xenophobic and – at least at the rhetorical level – anti-Westernist. On the other hand, unlike its Kemalist forebear, the new authoritarian nationalism portrays Turkey as a regional powerhouse, the potential leader of the (Sunni) Muslim world — championing a particular interpretation of Islam that attempts to reconcile it with modernization and the inner workings of a capitalist market society: the “new model” for which the regime was originally acclaimed.

Linking the old and the new political orders is what I call statist communalism.

Statist communalism is predicated upon a strong, paternalist state, one that values communities, above all family, tribe and clan (aşiret), over individuals and civil society. This paternalist state is not egalitarian; it does not tend to increase social welfare, or protect individuals or groups against encroachments on their rights and entitlements. On the contrary, it is perceived as and acts like a “father,” presiding over a hierarchical structure that promotes a form of communalism akin to the millet system of the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey has always been (and still is) an archipelago of communities held together by fiat and when necessary by force. Yet this contrived unity has never produced a society of shared values and practices, let alone a nation with a sense of a common past and destiny. The transition to full autocracy was so rapid and easy in Turkey because it has no unified society; because each community is ready to form an alliance with the state to further its own interests, turning a blind eye to the predicament of other communities; because overcoming autocracy requires resistance, and resistance requires unity, but the various communities despise one another as much as, if not more than, they despise autocrats; because for every community, including that of the oppressed, the only route to salvation is to nurture a leader from among its own ranks and to replace the autocrat with its own leader, thereby taking control of the state mechanism.

The future?

It may indeed be that there is more democratic resilience in Turkey than is apparent at this moment. Today’s crisis may turn into tomorrow’s opportunity. And even if the crisis proves to be of a more permanent nature, reflecting on it will shed light on the global tension between, on the one hand, the nation-state as a secular democratic project organized around a community with clearly demarcated boundaries, and, on the other, more universalistic projects that rely on theocratic authoritarianism at home and expansionism abroad.

It is clear that a country as heterogenous and vibrant as Turkey cannot be held together by an autocrat who relies on a slim majority, no matter how fragmented the opposition is. Either the country will be thrown into chaos and disorder (a scenario that cannot be tolerated by the international community, given Turkey’s pivotal role in the region and in various strategic alliances), or the opposition will finally decide to bury the hatchet, even if temporarily, and start acting together.

Needless to say, this does not require taking up arms or engaging in violence, which would be tantamount to mimicking the regime. As Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan show in their award-winning book “Why Civil Resistance Works,” nonviolent resistance campaigns are almost twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts.The answer to the Leninist question “What is to be done?” then, is not hard to come by. What is harder is to overcome statist communalism and to leave behind the bitter feuds and quarrels that stand in the way of an organized civil resistance. This may require us, as one of the protagonists in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s unique “The Little Prince” puts it, to endure the presence of a few caterpillars until we become acquainted with the butterflies. Not a particularly heavy price, I would hazard, if this is indeed the only way out.

This story was produced by Fellowship Magazine

Waging Nonviolence

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Umut Özkırımlı

Umut Özkırımlı is a senior research fellow at IBEI (Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals), a professor at Blanquerna, Ramon Llull University, and a senior research associate at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs). He is the author of the recently published “Cancelled: The Left Way Back From Woke.”  A longer version of this article was previously published at IEMed.org.

In Turkey, when forests are not on fire, they are being destroyed by greedy men in suits

Protests to save Akbelen forest continue despite the violence

Written byArzu Geybullayeva

( Globalvoices.org) – Since 2019, the local residents of İkizköy village in Turkey’s southwestern province of Muğla have been trying to prevent deforestation in the Akbelen forest, which is situated near their village. But in Turkey, the preservation of green spaces has never been a priority for the ruling Justice and Development Party, which has no sound environmental policy.

The crackdown in 2013 against a group of environmentalists trying to prevent the destruction of Gezi Park was a defining moment for the ruling government, marking the AKP’s anti-environmental turn. Since then, scores of protests have erupted across Turkey, often staged and organized by local residents trying to protect the remaining green spaces and prevent the expansion of power plants. But with a ruling government that lacks any green vision, prioritizes the economy at the expense of the environment, and allows greedy companies to fill in their coffers at the expense of regular citizens, it is a struggle that is here to stay. The deforestation in the Akbelen forest that began on July 24 is a brazen example of this. Meanwhile, the companies behind the forest destruction have refused to comply with a court order that suspended the project in the first place.

Business interests

Out of 35 coal-fired power plants, there are three power plants operating in Muğla — Yatağan (in operation since 1982), Yeniköy (in operation since 1986), and Kemerköy (in operation since 1993). All three were privatized in 2014. Yeniköy and Kemerköy were purchased by YK Energy, a joint company set up by Limak Holding and İÇTAŞ Enerji. Both Limak and İÇTAŞ are known for their ties to the ruling government.

Since taking over plant management, the companies have done little to address the devastating health and environmental implications of the plants. Local residents have documented these effects extensively in local and international reports. These implications also did not stop the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources from launching a new regulation in March 2022 that open the natural olive groves in the area to development, and green-lights mining activities for the power plants.

The same month, the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization, and Climate Change made amendments, for a fourth time, to a regulation governing protected natural areas (national parks, nature parks, environmentally protected zones, and wetlands), opening these areas for mining and construction. These decisions were announced amid an ongoing court case filed by the local residents of İkizköy village. Dismissive of the protests by the local residents, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry handed over some 740 decares (740,000 square meters) of forest land to YK Energy to mine for lignite in April 2021.

Screenshot from a documentary film about the struggle of the local people to prevent destruction of the Akbelen forest.

According to reporting by a local online news platform Bianet, the companies moved into the forest area on July 24, having obtained the necessary permissions to open 740 decares of land for cutting. The companies claim the lignite underneath the forest area will fuel the power plants of Yeniköy and Kemerköy, which use coal to generate just one percent of the consumed electricity in the country.

The protesters are now calling on the relevant authorities to scratch that permission. In a statement signed by 16 environmental non-governmental organizations, the signatories said, “Deforestation should not be allowed for the continuity of thermal power plants, which cause premature deaths and are one of the main causes of the climate crisis. Fighting the climate crisis is possible by working with nature, not against it. We cannot sacrifice forests, which account for more than half of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions we have caused in the last 10 years, for the sake of coal power plants that threaten natural areas, climate, and the lives of all living things.”

Consequences of environmental degradation

In recent years, Turkey has been hit by a series of natural disasters and environmental crises such as drought, wildfires, floods, and mudslides, and as recently as February 2023, a devastating earthquake. As summer heat reaches new highs, reports of forest fires hitting Turkey have been making the headlines. Experts say while climate change or excessive weather conditions may have had a role to play, these disasters and crises were also an outcome of poor planning and incorrect decisions made at the government level.

According to the Climate Transparency Turkey report, Turkey continues to generate more than 30 percent of its electricity through coal. The report also adds, “Despite the decrease in coal-powered generation in 2021–2022, Turkey has no intention to phase out coal and has approximately 20.4 GW of new coal capacity in the pipeline, placing it sixth globally. In June 2022, the first block of the China-financed 1.3 GW coal power plant opened in Hunutlu. While the coal capacity pipeline decreased by 63 percent in comparison to 2020, to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celcius or achieve Turkey’s goal of net zero emissions by 2053, no new coal power plants should be built.”

Turkey only ratified the 2015 Paris Agreement, which set a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celcius, in October 2021, five years after signing the agreement. At the time, Turkey also announced its goal to achieve net-zero emissions by 2053.

According to Climate Action Tracker, the country’s efforts to reach the Paris Accord’s goals are “critically insufficient.” And ratifying the Paris Agreement was not done with pure intentions. The decision came shortly after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan received guarantees of financial support from France, Germany, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, according to reports by Politico and Reuters. Previously, Ankara said the reason it had not signed the agreement was because of unfair classification. Turkey was ranked as an Annex I group country — a “developed” or “industrialized” country — which prevented it from seeking funding, unlike nations ranked as “developing.”

Back at the Akbelen forests, pleas for help from residents and demands to stop the destruction of the forest continued into their fourth day. One resident speaking to a Turkish newspaper Evrensel, pleaded, “If this place goes, everywhere will burn, Turkey will burn. Let’s not cut down our pines and forests.” Another resident said, “I came here from a village that was destroyed for coal before, and now they are kicking me out from here too. Aren’t we the people of this country? Soldiers are preventing us. Help us.” Reports and footage of local police using force, pepper spray, tear gas, and water canons have been circulating online, elevating the gravity of the situation in the area:

There is both slaughter and cruelty in Akbelen. The gendarmerie once again tear gassed the people of Ikizköy, who were trying to enter #AkbelenOrmanı together with the deputies from the Green Left Party and CHP. Three people were detained under torture.

YK Energy, set up by LİMAK and İÇTAŞ, started cutting in Akbelen Forest to supply coal for the thermal power plant. The gendarmerie intervened harshly against those who wanted to prevent the slaughter that had been going on for a few days.

Journalists covering the events were also targeted:

I got pepper sprayed directly into my eyes, as gendarmerie prevented me from filming.

At least two reporters were fined, while several residents were reportedly detained. There have also been reports of local police preventing people from accessing the area and setting up barricades.

Written byArzu Geybullayeva

Via Globalvoices.org