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Rise Of 'Turkish Gandhi' Offers Hope To Divided Nation

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  • Rise Of 'Turkish Gandhi' Offers Hope To Divided Nation

    RISE OF 'TURKISH GANDHI' OFFERS HOPE TO DIVIDED NATION

    The Globe and Mail
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/rise-of-turkish-gandhi-offers-hope-to-divided-nation/article1586255/
    May 31 2010
    Canada

    Lurid sex scandal propels reformer into leadership of party founded
    by Kemal Ataturk, giving opposition credible shot at power

    Doug Saunders

    Ankara -- From Monday's Globe and Mail Published on Monday, May. 31,
    2010 2:35AM EDT

    .Not just for his mild demeanour, his softly bespectacled appearance
    and his conciliatory, incorruptible reputation is he known in some
    circles here as the "Turkish Gandhi."

    As an ethnic minority bidding to lead a nation whose laws have
    officially denied that minorities exist, and as a man able to
    bridge the increasingly distrustful poles of a divided nation, Kemal
    Kilacdaroglu has the potential to change the nature of politics here -
    if he has the nerve to seize either opportunity.

    In the wake of a lurid sex scandal that drove his long-serving
    predecessor, Deniz Baykal, out of office last weekend after Mr. Baykal
    was videotaped having an affair with a staffer, the little-known
    financial bureaucrat and reformer, Kemal Kilacdaroglu, 61, was
    suddenly thrust into the leadership of Turkey's venerable secular
    opposition party.

    Almost overnight, he has given a credible shot at power to the
    beleaguered party founded by Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern
    secular Turkey. The CHP (Republican People's Party) was driven
    into distant second place after 2002 by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
    Erdogan's Islamic Peace and Justice party (AKP), which has blended
    the religious conservatism popular among the poor with a pro-business,
    pro-Europe worldliness that has turned Turkey into an economic force.

    In his first major interview with the North American media, Mr.

    Kilacdaroglu spent an hour in his Ankara office describing how he
    would take back the CHP, in part by paying less attention to the rigid
    secularism and self-contained nationalism that Mr. Ataturk considered
    the cornerstones of Turkish identity.

    But he refused abjectly to use his most surprising quality to take on
    an Obama-like role of a minority leading a party that spent decades
    enforcing laws that made minorities illegal and unmentionable.

    He is an Alevi - a member of Turkey's Shiite Muslim minority who have
    been brutally repressed under previous CHP governments - and a man who
    spent his childhood as a poor villager in a Kurdish-majority region
    (neither he nor his party will discuss whether his family background
    is Kurdish).

    "Since I believe that beliefs should not be the core of politics,
    I don't think it should really matter whether I'm Alevi, Sunni or
    anything else," he said, uneasily, when asked about whether he would
    use his ethnic identity as a new sign of openness.

    "My political approach is one in which beliefs and origins, like
    ethnicity, are not emphasized, but a human-based politics, where the
    core of everything is human."

    Mr. Kilacdaroglu did say, however, that he would support efforts -
    including a possible constitutional change - to make Turkey acknowledge
    that it is not a country with one ethnic group and one language, as
    has been the law for decades, but a place with a number of languages,
    religions and ethnicities, in which Alevites, Kurds and Armenians
    have struggled against campaigns of forced assimilation or outright
    cleansing.

    "Turkey took the heritage of the Ottoman Empire, and that was a
    multicultural, multiethnic community, so we cannot neglect or ignore
    these minorities," he said. "On the contrary, we accept them as part
    of the richness of our culture."

    This statement, which would be a bland platitude in North America
    and much of Europe, marks a revolutionary change in Turkey's secular
    establishment. It is still illegal to use the letters W, Q or X -
    part of the Kurdish, but not the Turkish, alphabet. The CHP has
    rigorously backed the law against "insulting Turkishness," which
    has been used to imprison dissidents, including Kurds and Armenians,
    who have dared suggest that Turkey's past included atrocities.

    Much of this has changed under Mr. Erdogan, who has allowed the Kurdish
    language to be spoken and opened a Kurdish-language public TV network;
    has entered negotiations aimed at normalizing relations with Armenia;
    and has sought a rapprochement with the leaders of Cyprus over the
    Turkish-occupied province of North Cyprus.

    This sense of dynamism inspired many otherwise secular-minded
    Turks to back Mr. Erdogan's AKP, despite their discomfort with its
    headscarf-wearing female MPs and attempts to restrict alcohol sales.

    The CHP has offered little other than secularism, and a closed,
    nationalistic culture and economy.

    On the need to win people back from the AKP, Mr. Kilacdaroglu mades
    his most shocking suggestion: that the party stop talking about
    secularism all the time.

    "I believe that to those people who have gone to the AKP, especially
    the poor, we should not be emphasizing the principle of secularism,"
    he said. "Their priority is to be able to feed themselves."

    Mr. Kilacdaroglu said he isn't completely willing to move away from the
    old ways: He spoke fervently about the need for government subsidies
    and a less aggressive path toward European Union membership, But he
    would reform the electoral system, allowing parties with less than
    10 per cent of the vote to sit in power - a move, though he wouldn't
    acknowledge this, whose main beneficiary would be the Kurdish party. It
    would also hurt the AKP, which has won a strong Kurdish following.

    If Mr. Kilacdaroglu is to have any chance in next year's elections,
    he will have to give these new politics a voice. Polls show that
    the CHP gained support after he took over the leadership, but still
    lags behind. If he is to build on this sense of electoral novelty,
    he may discover that his own startling narrative is his most potent
    political weapon.




    From: A. Papazian
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