CrossTalk: Syrian War Outcome

‘Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. What could the possible outcome regarding the Syrian Civil War be? Does the US really want Russia to be part of a negotiated settlement? Is the Syrian opposition becoming more dangerous to the US and its allies? CrossTalking with Ariel Cohen and Nabil Mikhail (15 May 2013)’.

Op-Ed: Pipelineistan and Turkey: The Geo-Political Realities behind Resource Rivalry and the Looming Climate Catastrophe

Recently, I wrote a piece of possibly wider interest for my column ‘The Erimtan Angle’ in the Istanbul Gazette.

In the 21st century, humanity has suddenly come face to face with the stupendous power of nature again. In the latter part of the previous century warnings regarding man-made or anthropogenic climate change started being voiced – arguably commencing in earnest with Professor Hansen’s testimony in front of the U.S. Senate during the summer of 1988. These dire words of caution arguably culminated in Al Gore’s sensational and “inconvenient” 2006 film. The Industrial Revolution and humanity’s subsequent immoderate burning of fossil fuels leading to a disproportionate increase in so-called greenhouse gases appear to be at the root of this apparently unnatural fluctuation in global temperatures – fluctuations which can lead to extreme weather events, such as hurricanes or floods. Very recently, in the first week of March this year actually, researchers from Oregon State University (OSU) and HarvardUniversity seem to have delivered the final verdict on anthropogenic climate change. They namely published the conclusions of their latest study in the journal Science, broadcasting to the wider world their concern with the state of the earth. Their findings reveal that our planet is warmer today than it has ever been during 70 to 80% of the last 11,300 years. As a result, the search for alternative fuels, fuels that would not lead to more greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere, should be the world’s leadership’s top priority given the looming threat of climate catastrophe that will eventually turn earth into a planet uninhabitable by humanity. In contrast, geo-political concerns and the simmering resource wars are such that attention remains focused on the remnants of earlier geologies. As a result, the consumption of fossil fuels continues unabated and the search for more hydrocarbon reserves follows suit – meaning that more and more greenhouse gases will keep on being added to the atmosphere for years and possibly decades to come. The war that in many ways started the 21st century can also be interpreted as having a close relationship to man’s endless thirst for ever-more fossil fuels.

The start of the invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October 2001 was presented as an act of war in direct response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11. But there is a back-story to Bush’s relationship with the land of Afghanistan. As such, the Taliban, in charge of the country since 27 September 1996 when they conquered the capital Kabul, sent a delegation to Texas in 1997. In Texas, the then-governor George W. Bush was instrumental in arranging meetings with the Texas oil firm Unocal. Quoting from a piece I wrote in 2010:

Unocal and its partners planned to build a 1,000-mile gas pipeline from resource-rich Turkmenistan to Multan in Pakistan [and then to India], passing through the Taliban heartland of Kandahar. In the waning years of the 20th century, the BBC dutifully reported that this deal was part “of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea.” In other words, the Unocal deal with the Taliban was instrumental in the 21st-century development of what the Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid has termed the “New Great Game,” in reference to the 19th-century rivalry between the Russian and British empires for supremacy in Central Asia . . . In the south [of Afghanistan], Kandahar is [now] awaiting the completion of the TAPI pipeline, which will traverse the province on its way to Pakistan and India. In meetings held in the Turkmen capitol of Ashgabat [on] April 17-18, [2010] the go-ahead was given and work on the lucrative project started in May, with 2015 as the provisional completion date when Turkmenistan’s liquid gas will start flowing southward. The US government is one of the strongest backers of this project. How do these machinations surrounding the pipeline project relate to the [still ongoing] war in the Hindu Kush region? According to former Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik, approximately two months prior to 9/11, the Bush administration had already decided to topple the Taliban regime and install a more amenable transitional government of moderate Afghans in its place. In July 2001 a four-day meeting was held in Berlin under the portentous heading of “brainstorming on Afghanistan.” The TAPI project was undoubtedly high on the session’s agenda. Literally one week after the attacks, the BBC’s former Pakistan correspondent George Arney related that Naik had “no doubt that after the World Trade Center bombings this pre-existing US plan had been built upon and would be implemented within two or three weeks.” And Niaz Naik proved right. Was he therefore really a man who knew too much? In early August 2009, Naik was tortured and murdered in his residence in Sector F-7/3 of Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad.

Did the TAPI project really play such an important role in the decision to invade Afghanistan? Was the outset of the continuing war against the Taliban (and “its Al-Qaeada allies” as the oft-repeated phrase goes) rather a calculated move to gain the initiative in the Central Asian resource war? Central Asia is a territory literally inundated with pipelines and in this context the investigative reporter Pepe Escobar coined the phrase Pipelineistan to refer to the CaspianBasin and the whole of Eurasia basically. And not just the West is addicted to fossil fuels being transported through this network of pipelines, the other global power which is China in equal measure relies on hydrocarbon assets being moved through Pipelineistan, converging in its Wild West, Xinjiang. From there, these assets are transported to mainland China in the east to fuel the ever-growing economy that has by now become the second-largest in the world. As for the TAPI pipeline, when the go-ahead, backed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), was given for the construction of this huge pipeline, measuring a staggering 1,735 kilometres, Turkey’s State Minister Zafer Çağlayan had also been present in Turkmenistan.

On Pipelineistan’s western edge, Turkey is now actively operating to be included in the scramble for the massive Turkmen gas reserves, located at the Dovletabad and the Galkynysh (‘Southern Yeloten – Osman’) deposits. In early 2012, Turkmenistan’s President Gurbanguly Berdimuhammadov was in Turkey, visiting Ankara and Istanbul, and meeting Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül. And also signing a document containing this declaration: “The parties [, i.e. Turkey and Turkmenistan] confirmed the need for continuing work on the development of regional projects aimed at restoring the development of socio-economic spheres [in] Afghanistan. In this regard, the Turkish side expressed its interest in major projects, including the Turkmenistan – Afghanistan – Pakistan – India (TAPI) gas pipeline project, increasing supply of Turkmen electricity to Afghanistan, as well as projects of transport infrastructure development and expressed its support for these projects” – Turkey now clearly also wants to reap some benefits from the pipeline to transport Turkmen gas to the Arabian Sea.

Turkey also has its own stakes in the infrastructure of Pipelineistan. For starters, there is the BTC or Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline transporting Caspian oil to the Mediterranean. In 1992, the Turkish Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel first proposed the construction of such a pipeline connection. In the further course of the 1990’s, the pipeline project was personally supported by U.S. President Bill Clinton. And finally, on 18 November 1999, when the Ankara Declaration was signed by Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, Clinton’s Energy Secretary Bill Richardson called the event “a major foreign policy victory” for the U.S. – a statement indicative of the continuing geopolitical importance of Turkey as a bridge between east and west. In the first instance, the sanctions on Iraq following the first Gulf War (2 August 1990-28 February 1991) meant that the Kirkuk-Yumurtalık pipeline was no longer able to transport Iraqi oil to the Mediterranean, thereby crippling the Turkish economy and depriving the world economy of an important source of oil, given that Ceyhan was (and still is) a world-class facility able to supply large tankers. In addition, the fall of the Soviet Union subsequently also meant that the vast Caspian oil and gas reserves could now be integrated into the West’s energy supplies’ system. On 25 May 2005, the BTC pipeline was inaugurated at the Sangachal Terminal on the Caspian by Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili and Turkey’s President Ahmet Sezer, joined by President Nursaltan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and United States Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman. The pipeline now daily transports 1 million barrels of Capian oil to the Mediterranean.

Another outlier of Pipelineistan present in Turkey is the Nabucco gas pipeline project, which has been in the works since 2005 and aims to be “the new gas bridge from Asia to Europe and the flagship project in the Southern Corridor”, connecting the EU with the major hydrocarbon sources in the Caspian and the Middle East. The project, aimed at liberating Europe from Russia’s energy stranglehold, has been beset by many problems and financial woes – with the German investor backing out last December. At the beginning of this month, the consortium backing the projected Nabucco pipeline signed a memorandum of co-operation with the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP), basically cutting the length of the Nabucco pipeline in two and limiting the cost considerably. Originally, the Nabucco pipeline was supposed to start its route from central Anatolia, but now the pipeline will only start its westward journey through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria at the Turco-Bulgarian border, relying on TANAP to supply gas from the Caspian and the Middle East. This shortened version has been called Nabucco West and would constitute a major rival for Russia’s South Stream pipeline project. And once again, Turkey’s trans-Atlantic friend is all but supportive as voiced by US State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland last year: “We strongly support Nabucco. We think it’s a very important project. It’s going to bring energy diversification on both sides and market diversification”. In other words, the interpersonal relations between Tayyip Erdoğan and Barrack Obama have not been futile. The U.S. clearly supports Turkey’s new pseudo-Ottoman programme, as a stable Turkey could very well become another foundation for America to build its renewed bridges into the Arab world, following the recent ‘spring weather’ and its ‘unexpected’ consequences. The Obama administration’s support for the west-bound section of Pipelineistan that is Nabucco also seems congruent with the U.S. and Turkey’s joint stance on the Assad regime, Turkey’s erstwhile friendly neighbour.

In fact, the recent civil war in Syria has actually ensured that the Nabucco pipeline project was given another lease of life. The protests against the Assad regime started in March 2011 turning violent the next month, while backdoor negotiations between Tehran, Baghdad and Damascus were underway. These talks led to the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding for the construction of a pipeline designed to deliver Iran’s natural gas to Iraq and Syria in the next three to five years at a cost of about $10 billion. From Syria, this pipeline could possibly also deliver gas to Lebanon and even to Europe in the future, securing a Mediterranean outlet for embattled Iran fighting sanctions and public disapproval. Now, the anti-Assad violence has ensured that this potential rival to Nabucco would not be able to emerge on the energy scene. Originally, Turkey planned to include Iran as a gas supplier to the pipeline, but the geo-political realities of the day and particularly the Obama administration’s continuation of the Bush era sanctions against Tehran, have managed to exclude Iran from the project. As a result, with the projected Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline, Tehran would still have been able to supply the global market. In spite of Iran’s rich oil and gas holdings, the country is effectively excluded from the confines of Pipelineistan.

The leadership in Tehran, however, seems to be persistent in its effort to find alternative ways to find outlets for its hydrocarbon reserves. Now, Iran’s leadership is looking to the east. Recently, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari attended a ceremony at the Iran-Pakistani border, unveiling a plaque and inaugurating the construction of a pipeline ar a cost of some $1.5 billion. A joint statement read at the ceremony stated that “The completion of the pipeline is in the interests of peace, security and progress of the two countries. It will also consolidate the economic, political and security ties of the two nations”. Iranian gas is supposed to start flowing towards Pakistan at the end of next year. The Iranian gas would be most welcome in Pakistan as the country faces a shortfall of 2 billion cubic of natural gas feet per day and is actually going through a serious energy crisis at the moment. Pakistan is without electricity for up to six hours a day— leading to the loss of export revenues, the closure of tens of thousands of factories, and, most importantly, the loss of millions of jobs.

While the world’s leaders and oil corporations are devising more and more schemes to flood the global energy market with oil and gas to be burnt, the world actually appears to be approaching climate catastrophe at an increased pace. In his 2011 book Deep Future, the climatologist Curt Stager maintains that the effects of current climate change will persist for much longer than we can imagine – he paints the best-case scenario as a world that won’t fully recover from the effects of the burning of fossil fuels for tens of thousands of years, and possibly much longer. Still, the long-term has never been a great concern for Turkish, or any other, policy-makers and the decisions taken today, the pipelines built now and tomorrow, and the fossil fuels consumed in the years to come will change the world beyond recognition. Geo-political interests and the ongoing resource rivalries resulting from humanity’s acute addiction to fossil fuels, coupled with profit-hungry corporations eager to benefit from any kind of fossil fuels found anywhere, now seem to condemn humanity to a bleak future for the sake of short-term profits and power.[1]

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[1] C. Erimtan, “Pipelineistan and Turkey: The Geo-Political Realities behind Resource Rivalry and the Looming Climate Catastrophe” ‘The Erimtan Angle’, The Istanbul Gazette (15 March 2013). http://istanbulgazette.com/pipelineistan-and-turkey-the-geo-political-realities-behind-resource-rivalry-and-the-looming-climate-catastrophe/2013/03/15/.

TRNN: Turkey, Israel and the Wider Middle East

‘Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Israel needed Obama to broker Turkey deal as Netanyahu’s policies and unstable region put Israel in a precarious position (25 March 2013)’.

Turkish Premier’s #MyJihad or Slander Across the USA

The pro-government daily Today’s Zaman reports that a ‘pro-Israeli, anti-Islamic extremist group, known for running anti-Muslim ads in the New York subway, has depicted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a terrorist in ads targeting the concept of jihad in Islam. The anti-jihad ads were designed by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) as a response to “MyJihad,” a public education campaign that seeks to share the proper meaning of jihad as believed and practiced by the majority of Muslims. MyJihad has been running various ads on buses and trains in cities across the US, in which it has tried to show the global values of Islam with such slogans as “My Jihad is not to judge people by their cover. What’s yours?” and “My Jihad is to build friendships across the aisle. What’s yours?” The AFDI, widely known for its controversial attacks on Islam, apparently designed its ads in the same way but with the opposite aim. One of the ads shows the angry face of Erdoğan next to a passage from a poem by Ziya Gökalp, a Turkish sociologist and writer, that Erdoğan famously recited in 1998. The poem reads, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers,” and next to this, the AFDI had added the sentence “That’s My Jihad. What’s yours?”’. [1]

As long ago as 2010, I wrote in the same newspaper that “[n]owadays the term jihad is much bandied about and used and/or abused at will by Muslims as well as non-Muslims the world over. The historian and Islam specialist Mark Sedgwick maintains that the concept of jihad was developed in the eighth century, when it basically functioned as a “mixture of the Army Regulations and the Geneva Conventions, appropriate for the circumstances of the time.” At the time of the Islamic conquests (seventh-eighth centuries), the world was divided between the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the House of War (Dar al-Harb) and international relations between both spheres were primarily military in nature. But as the centuries progressed and relations between Muslims and the outside world achieved a quasi-peaceful status quo, punctuated by commercial exchanges and trade links, the idea of jihad changed as well. There is the well-known distinction between the greater jihad (al-jihad al-akbar) and the lesser jihad (al-jihad al-asghar), between a personal struggle in the way of Allah (crf. Surah 29:69) and an armed struggle to protect believers against oppression and violence perpetrated by unbelievers. In other words, jihad evolved from a code of war into a defensive mechanism, tantamount to a religious duty leading to religious rewards”.[ii]  So much for the meaning of Jihad, either greater or lesser. Returning to Tayyip Erdoğan’s countanace in ads in the New York subway: in ‘1999, Erdoğan served four months in jail after being convicted of “Islamist sedition” for reading Gökalp’s poem at a political rally in Siirt when he was the mayor of İstanbul for the now-defunct Welfare Party (RP). His conviction came two years after an unarmed military intervention on Feb. 28, 1997, often dubbed a postmodern coup, which resulted in the fall of a coalition government led by RP leader Necmettin Erbakan . . . Apart from the attack on Erdoğan, the AFDI created similar ads, with the alleged words of Osama Bin Laden and Times Square bomber Faisal Shazad, and an alleged anti-Semitic sentence from a Hamas-owned TV channel. A lawyer from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recently sent a letter to the AFDI claiming ownership of the MyJihad ads and stating that the AFDI is violating MyJihad.org’s common law trademark and trade dress, or design, rights’.[3]

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[1] “Anti-Islam extremist group depicts Erdoğan as terrorist in public ads” Today’s Zaman (05 March 2013). http://www.todayszaman.com/news-308855-anti-islam-extremist-group-depicts-erdogan-as-terrorist-in-public-ads.html.

[2] C. Erimtan, “The war in Afghanistan: jihad, foreign fighters and al-Qaeda” Today’s Zaman (29 September 2010). http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?load=detay&link=222918.

[3] “Anti-Islam extremist group depicts Erdoğan as terrorist in public ads”.

Tayyip goes to Africa: Rising MIST!!!

On Monday, 7 January 2013, one can read in Hürriyet Daily News that ‘Turkey aims to increase its trade volume with African countries to $50 billion by 2015, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told journalists at Istanbul Atatürk Airport before his departure to Gabon. “Turkey has been exerting efforts in the development of Africa,” Erdoğan said. The prime minister will visit Gabon, Niger and Senegal in his first foreign trip abroad in the new year, where he will meet with heads of state, chair meetings between the countries’ officials, participate in business forums and sign several agreements during the six-day African tour. In Gabon, Erdoğan is set to meet with Gabonese President Ali Ben Bongo Ondimba and the country’s prime minister, Raymond Ndong Sima, as well as appear in a joint press conference. Accompanied by a large delegation of Turkish businesspeople, Erdoğan will speak at a Turkish-Gabonese business forum that would seek opportunities for cooperation in trade and investment. Erdoğan will then visit Niger on Jan. 8 on the second stop of his African tour and meet with President Mahamadou Issoufou. On Jan. 10, the last stop of the tour, Erdoğan is set to arrive in Senegal to meet with President Macky Sall and Prime Minister Abdoul Mbaye. Turkey’s exports to Senegal stood at $109 million in the January-October period of 2012, down from $116 million over the same period a year earlier. Turkey has opened embassies in 19 African countries in the last three years to bring the total number of its top diplomatic missions in the continent to 31’.[1]

The Financial Times’ Turkey correspondent Daniel Dombey puts forward that over “the past three years, Turkey has opened 19 embassies on the continent [of Africa]. It now has 26 south of the Sahara and will have opened delegations in Chad, Guinea and Djibouti by the end of January [2013] as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister, visits Gabon, Niger and Senegal”.[ii]  Dombey explains further that these diplomatic efforts are “part of a concerted push by Turkey deep into Africa, as it follows China, Brazil and India in seeking to secure economic and political influence on the continent. As Ankara looks to diversify away from the stuttering European economy, it is searching not only for new markets but also a more prominent role on the world stage”.[3]

And this is part of yet another trend, step aside BRIC here comes MIST: ‘Jim O’Neill, the Goldman Sachs economist who came up with the now-mainstream “BRIC” catch-all for four quite different economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China – has done it again. “MIST” – or Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey – is O’Neill’s latest rhetorical agglomeration, pulling four more far-flung countries together and talking-up the next tier of large “emerging economies”. Pundits might have a field day with this, with MIST obviously more vapid and perhaps lacking the solidity of its BRIC antecedent. Still, all four have in common a number of factors: a large population and market, a big economy at about 1% of global GDP each, and all are members of the G20’.[4]

As an up and coming MIST country, Turkey is attempting to crack the African market now. In previous months, Turkey’s commitment to Somalia was apparent as part of its more overt Islamic image; but now, the cold reality of economics seems to be taking a front seat. But, the ever-diplomatic Turkish PM instead appears to use his trip to criticise Europe for its colonial legacy, highlighting Turkey’s difference and suitability as an equal business partner with no harmful colonial heritage. In Niger, for example, attending a Turkish-Niger Business Forum in Niamey, he stated plainly: “That is why we are in Niger today. We do not aim to take this country’s oil, gold and diamonds, but to show how we can build brotherhood, make an effort to advance development and fight for freedom of a colonial logic that has endured here for centuries”.[5]  According to Today’s Zaman, ‘Erdoğan said [further that] Ankara will continue supporting Turkish small businesses to increase their investment in Niger and that Turkey will be delighted to see its construction companies take part in Niger’s development projects’.[6]  But Turkey is not just an interesting destination for smart investors and relaxing tourists, ‘up to 50 intrepid Arab tourists arrive in Istanbul every day to undergo [a certain] procedure [to do with facial hair]. Moustaches are seen as a sign of virility and seniority in many Middle Eastern countries, and visitors are arriving in Turkey in droves for procedures designed to provide thick and impressive hair on their upper lips. The surgery is performed under local anesthetic, with doctors taking hair follicles from more hirsute areas of the body and implanting them in the face. Costing anywhere up to $7 000, the procedure has seen a spike in popularity in patients from the Middle East. In fact the job has become bread and butter work for Turkish cosmetic surgeon Dr. Selahattin Tulunay, based in the fashionable Nisantasi district, the so-called Beverly Hills of Istanbul, and who performs up to 60 follicular transplants a month’.[7]  In fact, about a month ago, the Young Turks did a piece on this very topic.

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[1] “Turkish PM Erdoğan sees $50 billion in African trade” Hürriyet Daily News (07 Jan 2013). http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish-pm-erdogan-sees-50-billion-in-african-trade.aspx?pageID=238&nID=38502&NewsCatID=344.

[2] Daniel Dombey, “Turkey flexes economic muscle in Africa” FT (06 Jan 2013). http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d9b175de-4849-11e2-8aae-00144feab49a.html#axzz2HHH5gKqZ.

[3] Daniel Dombey, “Turkey flexes economic muscle in Africa”.

[4] Simon Roughneen, “After BRIC comes MIST, the acronym Turkey would certainly welcome” The Guardian (01 February 2011). http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/feb/01/emerging-economies-turkey-jim-oneill.

[5] “Erdoğan: Turkey desires lasting cooperation with Africa” Today’s Zaman (08 Jan 2013). http://www.todayszaman.com/news-303502-erdogan-turkey-desires-lasting-cooperation-with-africa.html.

[6] “Erdoğan: Turkey desires lasting cooperation with Africa”.

[7] “Moustache hunters travel to Turkey for facial hair implants” AFP Relaxnews (06 Jan 2013). http://www.timeslive.co.za/lifestyle/2013/01/06/moustache-hunters-travel-to-turkey-for-facial-hair-implants.

The Arab Awakening: The plan to destabilize Syria

A report by Thierry Meyssan, in which he describes the efforts put by certain western governments in an attempt to overthrow the political system in the country in assistance with their Arab agents in the region.

(22 August 2011)

At the same time, Haytham Manna, a spokesman for Syria’s National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, declared that “These people [Saudi mercenaries] are destroying Syria . . . Unfortunately, there are political players, such as Turkey, who allow them to invade Syria”.[1]  The Russian news and information agency RIA Novosti concludes that ‘[s]everal Syrian opposition groups have contended for the opportunity to represent the anti-government movement in the struggle. However, an array of countries, including the European Union, have recognized only the Syrian National Council. Anti-government rebel forces have been locked into a protracted civil war with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The UN has estimated that nearly 40,000 have died since the fighting began in March 2011’.[2]

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[1] “Syrian Opposition Accuses Turkey of Allowing Mercenaries” RIANovosti (28 November 2012). http://en.rian.ru/world/20121128/177799664.html.

[2] “Syrian Opposition Accuses Turkey of Allowing Mercenaries”.

Vladimir goes South: Putin meets Erdoğan in İstanbul, 3 December 2012

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN:

  Mr Prime Minister, ladies and gentlemen,

 The trusting & open spirit in which today’s talks took place and the level of our trade and economic ties give us every reason to consider that we have come to a friendly country. We have come not only to visit a partner and neighbour, but truly have come to a country that is our friend. The High-Level Cooperation Council, which just held its third meeting, has once again confirmed its importance as a bilateral partnership mechanism that has already proven its worth.

 The Council’s sector-specific expert groups have done a lot of preparation and ensured that we had a very substantive agenda indeed. We discussed in detail a wide range of issues.

 I note that our bilateral trade continues to develop fast. Russia is now in solid second place among Turkey’s trade and economic partners. Last year, despite the general decrease in global trade, our bilateral trade increased by 26 percent, and by a further 14 percent over the first nine months of this year. This is an excellent trend and a good result, especially when set against the global economy’s current difficulties. Our objective, as the Prime Minister just said, is to raise our bilateral trade to the $100-billion mark in the coming years. This is a completely realistic goal.

 We just signed the trade & economic and science and technology cooperation programme through to 2015. The programme aims to bolster our industrial cooperation and develop bilateral ties in construction, the metals industry and agriculture. It also contains measures to promote cooperation in science-intensive sectors such as telecommunications, space exploration and developing satellite systems.

 Of course, one of our big cooperation areas is the energy sector, and here, our work together is not limited to fossil fuels, even if they do play a very important part. As the Prime Minister knows, Russia is always ready to give our Turkish partners a shoulder to rely on at difficult times, and if there are any glitches with energy supplies from other countries, we will increase our deliveries at the first demand.

 We thank our Turkish friends for their decision on the South Stream project. Construction work will begin in a couple of days, and our Turkish partners and friends have been invited to attend this event too.

 I note too our joint plans to build Turkey’s first nuclear power plant at Akkuyu. This is a big and promising project involving substantial investment – $20 billion. Russia is taking care of the project financing completely. At least a quarter of the total amount will be spent on creating new jobs in Turkey itself.

 We have just overseen the signing of a number of financial sector agreements. Russia’s Sberbank acquired DenizBank, Turkey’s ninth-biggest bank, in September this year, in a deal worth a total of $3.6 billion. This is one of the biggest deals, if not the biggest, in Europe’s banking sector over the last year.

 The Council also discussed humanitarian matters at today’s meeting. Our bilateral public forum is beginning its practical work now.

 As far as humanitarian issues go, education and science are both important areas. I spoke about the nuclear project before, and I want to note that more than 100 students from Turkey are studying in this particular field in Russia. In other words, if the project goes ahead — and so far it is going to schedule — it will help to create a whole new high-tech professional sector in Turkey.

 There is the tourism sector too. As the Prime Minister noted, 3.5 million Russian tourists visit Turkey every year, and the figure will be even higher this year. This is a sign of our trust in Turkey and its government, a sign of our confidence in your country’s stability. This is what you could call ‘voting with one’s feet’ in the good sense of the term.

 Russia & Turkey are neighbours and we share many common pages in history, sometimes dramatic pages. It is very important that we treat this heritage with respect.

We have gone through all manner of events in our history, but this is all part of the past now, and we must look toward the future. It makes me very happy to see that our Turkish friends share this view and that this is what we do.

Of course, as was mentioned too, we also discussed the international agenda, including the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Syria, and the situation in North Africa and the Middle East in general.

Let me conclude by once more thanking the Prime Minister and all of our Turkish friends for these very constructive and productive talks. We have agreed to hold the fourth meeting of High-Level Cooperation Council in Russia in 2013.

Thank you for your attention.

Sırrı Süreyya Önder Talks about İdris Naim Şahin

While on hunger strike recently, the independent member of parliament (as an affiliate of the Emek Özgürlük ve Demokrasi Bloğu) Sırrı Süreyya Önder wrote a poem about the Minister of the Interior, İdris Naim Şahin, adding that the latter’s presence as a minister constitutes a great hope for the Turkish people . . . if İdris Naim Şahin can become Minister of the Interior today, then now anybody can really achieve any goal in the Republic of Turkey (22 Nov 2012).

Kurbanam kalın kaşına

Taç yakışan başına

Birgün görmesem

Ey İdris Naim

Yanaram ataşına!

Blasphemy in Turkey Today: To Say or not to Say???

Last May I posted an entry on Fazıl Say and his tweets,[1] and now, at long last, there seems to be some movement in his case, as related by Veli Şirin, the Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism in Germany: “Say appeared in an Istanbul court on October 18 and was charged with hate speech and insulting religion for Twitter messages mocking the conduct and beliefs of Islamic fundamentalists. He faces a potential sentence of 18 months in prison. In one tweet, he commented on a muezzin, who calls Muslims to prayer, for his hurried style. In traditional Islam, the call to prayer, or ezan, is supposed to be delivered melodiously; muezzins from different mosques compete to see who can recite it in the most extended and pleasing tones (even though it is now usually played on speakers from a sound recording at the top of a minaret, rather than being rendered by a live person [as an aside, let me point out that since the mid-1990’s, the call to prayer is once again delivered live in most cases, but not from the top of a minaret rather from terra firma into a handy microphone]). A Muslim adage says that a discordant call to prayer or an ugly mosque is against religion. But following the example of the Saudi Wahhabi sect,[2] fundamentalist muezzins now read out the call to prayer in a brusque manner resembling that of a grumpy public transit driver announcing a series of stops”.[3]

The pianist appeared on CNN Türk‘s programme Aykırı Sorular (‘Contrary Questions’), presented by Enver Aysever, and pronounced the following choice words: “Is the government now going to determine if a man believes in Allah or not?”, adding “they want me to believe in Allah by condemning me to one year and a half of prison time”. [4]  The above-quoted Şirin, not coincidentally writing on the website of the neoconservative and right-wing Gatestone Institute, gives the following verdict: “The case of Fazil Say exposes the falsity of the modern and democratic image of Turkey that the Erdogan government is trying to project to the world. Free speech is limited to members of the political elite – except for criticism of religion, which is prohibited even to them. As the influential journalist Semih Idiz wrote in the leading Turkish daily Hürriyet on October 23, the case against Fazil Say “has nothing to do with ‘justice’ in the objective sense of the word . . . Say has become a nemesis for most Justice and Development Party (AKP) followers and religious conservatives, who would be more than happy to see him receive a prison sentence, regardless of what this does to Turkey’s image abroad. As for his ‘virtuosity’ and ‘international fame’ these mean little for a large proportion of the conservative Turkish public, which has no appreciation of Western classical music – or any form of Western high culture – anyway.” Idiz expressed his doubt that the outcome of the Fazil Say case will demonstrate that the current Turkish government has a positive commitment to freedom of speech”.[5]  And the pianist himself laconically remarked “The whole world is laughing at Turkey, just look at this court case I am involved in”.[6]  

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[1] “Insulting Islam: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkey” A Pseudo-Ottoman Blog (27 May 2012).  http://sitanbul.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/insulting-islam-pakistan-afghanistan-and-turkey/.

[2] Cfr. “Tayyip’s Mosque: The Legacy Project” A Pseudo-Ottoman Blog (23 September 2012). http://sitanbul.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/tayyips-mosque-the-legacy-project/.

[3] Veli Şirin, “Turkey: Fazil Say, Composer, Charged with Blasphemy for Tweets” Gatestone Institute (13 November 2012). http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3448/turkey-blasphemy-fazil-say.

[4] “Say: Hapisle Allah’a inanmamı istiyorlar” NTVMSNBC (14 November 2012). http://www.ntvmsnbc.com/id/25397543/.

[5] Veli Şirin, “Turkey: Fazil Say, Composer, Charged with Blasphemy for Tweets”.

[6] “Say: Hapisle Allah’a inanmamı istiyorlar”.

Turkey’s Role in the Syrian Conflict

‘The Turkish government has been a key player in the foreign-backed countries’ scenario against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad not only by handing over all its borders to the so called Free Syrian army but also by contributing to the funding, providing of weapons and security to the insurgent groups inside Turkey borders. The Turkish government has never admitted to having weapons in the camp rather they say the camps are being used for humanitarian reasons, that may be true for a portion of the 120,000 some civilians caught in the cross fire, between Syrian government forces and rebel insurgents, but a large portion of the people living in the camp aren’t even Syrian nationals (13 Nov 2012)’.

Çoşkun Sönmez is a member of the opposition CHP,[1] resident of Antakya in the Hatay region of Turkey . . .

While the Occupy Syria group posted another picture of the actions of the Syrian opposition: “FSA… War crimes at their BEST!”.[2]

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[1] Cfr. “Coşkun Sönmez” facebook https://www.facebook.com/coskun.sonmez.

[2] “Occupy Syria” facebook. https://www.facebook.com/coskun.sonmez#!/Occupy.syr.