southeastern europe

What’s next for Turkey after local elections put Erdoğan on notice

2024-05-11T08:52:00.008+01:00

Published in The Conversation: April 16, 2024, 11.03am EDT

The recent municipal elections in Turkey represented a significant defeat for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, signalling a potential shift in Turkey’s political landscape.

For more than two decades, Erdoğan has extended his control over the Turkish media, the judiciary and the state bureaucracy, establishing an uneven playing field and skewed elections.

This time, though, his Justice and Development Party — known as AKP — and its coalition with the ultra-right wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) lost 15 key municipalities.

Mansur Yavas, Ankara’s mayor and CHP presidential hopeful, gestures to supporters in Ankara on March 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Ali Unal)

After a disastrous and divisive presidential campaign in 2023, the opposition, led by the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), assumed control of crucial municipal and provincial jurisdictions on March 31, 2024.

The CHP, energized by fresh leadership and capable candidates, attracted backers of its former ally, the nationalist Good Party (İYİ). Supporters of the Pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) also supported the CHP, confirming a tacit partnership.

Electoral volatility

Economic concerns, along with Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule, likely contributed to higher abstention rates among conservative Kurds and other AKP sympathizers, aiding the CHP’s success.

Increased political visibility for the CHP poses a challenge for Erdoğan, who now must reignite the country’s economy and stem the rising appeal of both secular parties and rival splinter Islamist entities, including the more conservative New Welfare Party (YRP). The March results indicate a shift toward more vigorously contested elections in Turkey.

Despite the ADP’s losses, however, the ruling coalition’s support base remains more or less stable at about 40 per cent of the electorate. Erdoğan’s core supporters still distrust the secularist CHP due to its record before the AKP’s ascent to power. They remember the party’s aggressive secularism and contempt towards them.

Erdoğan’s populism capitalizes on these grievances as he reminds his supporters of the constant military oversight of politics, coup attempts and headscarf bans employed by the secularist leaders who preceded him.

Stoking fear among his base, he positions himself as the defender of conservative religious values and a guardian against threats to the civil rights of conservative Turks. This fear has deterred his supporters from defecting to opposition parties, which are reluctant to break ranks and engage meaningfully with their religious conservative opponents.

Opposition İstanbul and Ankara mayors — Ekrem Imamoglu and Mansur Yavas, respectively, who are also CHP presidential hopefuls — borrow from the same populist playbook. They contrast “the people” with “the Islamist elites,” criticizing the decline of secularism and lamenting the waning of democracy under Erdoğan in an effort to mobilize their supporters.

They downplay the diversity of their supporters and speak about the abstract “national will” — a term also favoured by Erdoğan — while invoking the concept of the “indivisible people,” an entity that’s difficult to define.

At their rallies, the iconography of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — the first president of the Republic of Turkey and a symbol of Turkey’s secular foundations — is prevalent. This imagery serves to remind supporters of the loss of democracy inflicted by their opponents.

Deepening divisions

But this focus on Ataturk also alienates religious conservatives, including those who chose not to vote in March. It deepens divisions and fears among those who are wary of Ataturk’s aggressive secularist legacy.

It also hinders dialogue and reinforces Turkey’s majoritarian political system, which was formalized with the winner-takes-all presidential system introduced in 2018. This system produces a distorted model of politics where leaders claim to be representing the will of a homogeneous electorate devoid of differences and diversity. It’s reinforced by the use of familial terms — Erdoğan’s supporters liken him to a brother, for example, a term that he also uses frequently in his speeches. Ataturk is likened to a father who led his children to prosperity. Imamoglu likens the 16 million Istanbulites — half of which voted for his re-election as mayor — to a family.

But in deeply polarized Turkey, ignoring the diversity of voters weakens the country’s prospects for meaningful democracy. It downplays the fact that fear and mistrust trap voters in echo chambers where the voices, experiences, fears and aspirations of others cannot be heard and where necessary but uncomfortable conversations cannot take place.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leader of the AKP, leaves a polling station with his wife after voting on March 31, 2023. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)

Important conversations

Popular leaders like Imamoglu — the most likely Erdoğan challenger — need to break out of the straitjacket of the father/brother symbolism and its potential for authoritarian, populist repercussions. They need to foster a political culture that shifts the attention from the leader to more participatory democratic politics and enables important conversations across Turkey’s cultural and political divides.

Imamoglu’s stint as Istanbul mayor has sparked inclusive conversations and prioritized policies that emphasize human development. He’s advocated for services and projects aimed at inclusiveness and social justice, offering a Turkish model for non-populist politics. His political campaigning, however, has paid lip service to the diversity of the electorate and the different fears and aspirations that motivate and constrain voters. It’s focused too much on his personality.

Nagorno-Karabakh: What’s next for the South Caucasus region following Azerbaijan’s aggression against Armenians?

2023-10-18T06:19:00.004+01:00

Spyros A. Sofos, Simon Fraser University

Azerbaijani forces attacked the breakaway and long-disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023. Less than a month later, and the region is now all but deserted.

The declared aim of the attack was to eliminate the last forces of the Armenian-majority self-styled republic. The lightning “anti-terror operation,” as Azerbaijan called it, precipitated the collapse of the breakaway republic. Most importantly — given that it came after a debilitating blockade that lasted for almost nine months — it instilled fear among the Karabakh Armenian population.

Many fled their ancestral homeland.

As an endless convoy of cars transporting desperate refugees filled the winding road to an uncertain future away from their homes, regional entities were lining up to influence the future shape of the South Caucasus region on the border of eastern Europe and west Asia. The conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia has been unfolding there for decades.

Aliyev’s regime

In Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev has been investing heavily in cultivating nationalism and militarism over the past few years to shore up his authority and his regime.

Starting from the second Karabakh war in 2020 until the present, Azerbaijan’s Border Service and Armed Forces used inspirational pop music videos to glorify the government’s military posturing and patriotic films to incite nationalism.

After Azerbaijan’s 2020 victory effectively cut off Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia — leaving only one precarious point of access to the outside world, the Russian-policed Lachin corridor — the international community urged a negotiated peace settlement that would ensure Nagorno-Karabakh’s reintegration to Azerbaijan in exchange for local self-government.

But Aliyev’s preference for military action was no surprise, since a self-governed Nagorno-Karabakh would have required conflict resolution that was at odds with his preferred authoritarian and centralized governance approach over the rest of Azerbaijan.

Aliyev’s boldness was enabled by Russia’s and Turkey’s interests. Both are intent on regional peacemaking. This allows them to maintain their dominance in the South Caucasus region and keeps both the European Union and the United States at arm’s length.

Russia, Turkey influence

Russia and Turkey have developed a model I call “managed competition” in the South Caucasus to ensure their often competing objectives don’t undermine their common goal to exclude states with opposing interests.

They worked together during the 2020 conflict to ensure they were the only powers to have a presence by stationing peacekeeping and monitoring forces in Nagorno-Karabakh and the Lachin corridor, albeit Turkey assumed a lesser and mostly symbolic role. The Turks are intent on doing so now as well.

The “two states, one nation” slogan used by Turkey and Azerbaijan to emphasize the ethnic kinship of their people underlies their strategic partnership, including co-ordination on foreign policy, energy and defence.

Turkey supported Azerbaijan with arms and by training the Azerbaijani Armed Forces in both the 2020 and 2023 conflicts.

Azerbaijan, in turn, has helped Turkey reduce its energy dependence on Russia and Iran by boosting its own gas exports.

Both Russia and Turkey regard military action in Nagorno-Karabakh as an opportunity to open the Zangezur corridor — a land bridge between the Nakhcivan (the only part of Azerbaijan sharing a border with Turkey and largely dependent on it) and the rest of Azerbaijan that will effectively provide a link between the two countries.

An increasingly isolated Russia sees in a friendly Azerbaijan a crucial link to Iran and its Persian Gulf ports and a valuable ally that gives it strategic depth in the South Caucasus.

By sacrificing its traditional alliance with Armenia and acquiescing to Azerbaijani aggression, Russia wants to convince Aliyev not to undermine Russia’s strategy of disrupting western natural gas supplies.

Furthermore, the destabilizing effect of a tense relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan strengthens Russia’s role as an arbiter in the region.

Stoking nationalism

Aliyev knows how to stir nationalist fervour, and he’s likely to continue creating tensions if Russia allows him to.

He’s already been designating territories in Armenia as “western Azerbaijani lands” and vowed to work for “the return” of western Azerbaijanis to Armenia.

Another reason Russia is turning a blind eye to Azerbaijan’s military posturing — including its occupation of 50 square kilometres of Armenian territory — is the effect it has in destabilizing the current Armenian government.

Russia considers Armenia a reluctant ally that’s increasingly looking westwards. Already, Armenia’s pro-Russian opposition anticipates the demise of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and its return to power, despite its history of corruption and cronyism.

If the current developments provide any indication of what a post-conflict scenario underwritten by Russia and Turkey will look like in the region, the picture is bleak.

Russia and Turkey opt for containment, not peace and reconciliation, and so tensions will likely intensify in the South Caucasus until the next opportunity to forge a genuine peace presents itself.

Spyros A. Sofos, Assistant Professor in Global Humanities, Simon Fraser University

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

Spyros Sofos: Bulgaria’s Blackmail is Unfair

2023-09-14T07:21:00.013+01:00

INTERVIEW 13.09.23

19
ПРЕГЛЕДИ

At a time when Macedonia is under strong international pressure concerning the constitutional changes, and the region is waiting to see whether it will be coupled to the European locomotive, external views become a dire need for the country to position itself on the right coordinates during the geopolitical developments that will not leave us unaffected. After the interview with the German journalist and specialist on the Balkans Michael Martens, we present to you another conversation, this time with Spyros Sofos, whose research at the London School of Economics and Political Science has focused, among other things, on social insecurity, identity and collective action, as well as populism in Southeast Europe.

He says that Bulgarian elites playing the nationalist card poses the risk of adding fuel to the fire in the region at a time when North Macedonia's access to the EU would render the contentious issues irrelevant. Regarding the US sanctions or blacklists, as they are popularly known, he points out that they can be easily circumvented by those to whom they apply, because those individuals can still handle their accounts and assets abroad, registered under a different person, and often such individuals can maintain a luxurious way of life in their countries. He also believes that the Prespa Agreement opened the door for bringing back the voice of Macedonians in Greece.

Mr. Sofos, you are considered as someone who knows the region well because you analyse a large part of the processes through your research and academic work. Are you following the dispute between Bulgaria and North Macedonia? Is it fair for North Macedonia to be blackmailed on its path to the EU?

- The Bulgarian elites playing the nationalist card is an additional obstacle that poses the risk of adding fuel to the fire of nationalism in the region at a time when North Macedonia's entry into the EU would render the contentious issues irrelevant. Let me be clear: not only is this blackmail unfair to the people of North Macedonia, but it is also an attempt to hold the Bulgarian electorate hostage to the country's traditional political elites. It has very little to do with whether the people on the other side of the border feel Bulgarian, are Bulgarian, dream in Bulgarian or at some point in history were Bulgarian. This is exactly what the elites are doing by using threats, all over the region – reverting to good old nationalism when they feel they are losing control.

The opposition is strongly opposed to the inclusion of Bulgarians in the Macedonian Constitution - which is a condition for EU membership negotiations. Given that you were born and raised in Greece, which also had a turbulent political history, what is your message to Skopje on that issue?

- It is difficult to pass on lessons. I can only say one thing. The opposition thrived in moments of nationalist tensions. It took advantage of and exacerbated the dispute with Greece to maintain its control over the country and its resources, and eventually left power nearly bankrupting the country. I'm not suggesting that it hasn't changed and will do the same thing again. However, I believe that nationalist reflexes are deeply rooted in the psyche of VMRO-DPMNE and sometimes they prevent it from taking a politically constructive stance. The existence and prosperity of North Macedonia can be better within the framework of the European Union (although the EU is by no means the solution to all problems, far from it).

The existence and well-being of the people in the country depend on investments, open borders and opportunities for cooperation with Macedonia's European allies. I cannot speculate on what the optimal response to Bulgarian pressure should be other than to emphasize that North Macedonia has already enshrined in its Constitution its incredible and strong cultural, religious and ethnic diversity and it has not suffered from it. The recognition of diversity is a strength in itself because it reduces the tensions that its suppression can cause, and in the current situation, it can pave the way for the country's membership in the EU. The Bulgarian nationalist elites are the ones who have more to lose in the long term with some sort of compromise (which will reflect the political reality on the ground because there are Macedonians in North Macedonia who have an affinity for Bulgaria), which will not affect the coherence of North Macedonia and will silence the Bulgarian nationalists. But I would like to see the EU adopt a more active and constructive role in this process.

The Prespa Agreement is a turning point

North Macedonia and Greece made the famous Prespa Agreement, which put an end to three decades of "antagonism". What are your assessments five years after that Agreement?

- I was very happy to see North Macedonia and Greece find a solution (however imperfect) to their dispute. I believe that it has strengthened the relations between the two countries and societies, although I see it as the first of many steps to be taken. However, I would also like to add that I was a critical supporter of the agreement. I realize that it was a child of compromise and as such was criticized on both sides. However, I think that the Prespa Agreement has improved relations between the two countries and, despite the initial opposition of the current party in power in Greece, I am happy to see that Greece is proceeding with the implementation of the agreement. True, the agreement provides opportunities to do much more in cross-border cooperation and obtain closer and deeper cooperation in so many fields, therefore both countries should do much more to integrate and provide a better future for their citizens.

Greece did not object to the registration of the non-governmental organization Macedonian Language Centre in Lerin - a move that was welcomed and commended in North Macedonia. What other benefits can be expected from the Prespa Agreement?

- I think there will be a process of "normalization" of the position of Greek citizens who identify themselves as Macedonians - by this I mean improving the conditions that will enable them to get a voice, representation, building institutions and becoming part of the main events and processes. So far, we have seen small steps and we will continue to see small steps. It is interesting that these steps are not direct outcomes of the Prespa Agreement, but of the positive climate created by that agreement. There are thorny issues ahead – the right of ethnic Macedonians of Greek origin to gain access to the property, and even to be able to visit their villages and towns. But only the positive climate we have now can pave the way for this.

Do you see a future for the Western Balkans?

- I see a mixed picture. Throughout the region there are societal forces that look to the future with a positive vision, but there are groups that harbour interests in maintaining corruption, nepotism, inciting nationalism and what is worse is that these forces have a strong hold on large segments of the population - those who fear change or those who are subject to xenophobic discourses and fears of the destruction of tradition and the disintegration of family values. The different results of the presidential and parliamentary elections in Montenegro, the modest results of progressive forces in the local elections in Serbia against a very conservative political system, the protests against Vucic and his allies, the political dead-end in Bosnia or the current Bulgarian coalition government demonstrate the division across the region.

One gets the impression that the international community is going round in circles when managing the crisis between Kosovo and Serbia. Why, despite all efforts, has there been no result?

- Western diplomacy, after the US-led intervention in Kosovo, sees Kosovo more as a problem than as a potential success story. Western diplomats and peacekeepers have not dared to encourage dialogue and cooperation between Kosovo Albanians and Serbs and to find interlocutors who would be willing to engage with them and each other. Then the war in Ukraine happened, which made the European Union realize that it is not paving ways in the Western Balkans in terms of building trust, providing vision and supporting progressive forces. It resorted to the solution of appeasing the forces that were sceptical or hostile to European integration in order to reduce Russia's influence in the region. But this is a solution that would be hard to sustain because the status quo in the region encourages inequality, nepotism, corruption and the prolonging of chronic problems in the region.

US sanctions are being circumvented

Why has corruption become a strong feature of the Balkan region? Apart from the countries of the so-called Western Balkans, I also mean the EU members, Bulgaria, Greece and Croatia. What is it that makes the climate so conducive to corruption?

- In many of these countries, the form of liberal democracy was appropriated or abused by established elites for their own benefit and to take over resources that should belong to all. I think what is needed in the region is a strong civil society that will hold the political elites accountable. We need to deepen our democracies, which is a long and difficult process.

Can the American blacklist, which recently included a powerful mayor from Macedonia and a close associate of Vucic in Serbia, help in the fight against corruption in the region?

- We have seen that such sanctions can be easily circumvented by those to whom they apply, as they can still handle their accounts and funds abroad, registered under a different person, and often such individuals can maintain a luxurious lifestyle in their countries. The main function of the blacklist is symbolic, although increasingly the US Treasury Department and other financial institutions are refining their blacklists to make them more effective. What I think should be added to those lists is the support of the groups, organizations and individuals who fight against corruption and their actions for greater transparency and justice.

You are also considered as someone who is well informed and has done research on the processes in Turkey. Why is President Erdogan such a powerful figure - he endured the military coup, the massive earthquake that claimed many lives among other things due to the chaos in the standards of construction, and the record inflation that reached 70 percent?

- Erdogan is a product of his time, and his rise represents the factorization of a part of Turkish society that was marginalized by what we call the Kemalist system. It is not only the religious Turks, but also the rural and urban underprivileged population, internal migrants, those who accept menial jobs to maintain the lifestyle of a large, more privileged part of society. These people were ignored. They had little access to education, job opportunities and political representation. Erdogan managed to mobilize their fears of a return to the political situation before his rise to power and their aspirations for a good life and convince them that under him they would continue to do relatively well and be heard. As long as such inequalities continue to exist in Turkish society and fuel Turkey's political polarization, Erdogan will prosper.

Journalist: Sonja Kramarska

Published on 13.09.23

Narrating the pandemic: COVID-19 as a feature of Turkey’s political landscape

2020-07-08T20:35:00.000+01:00

by Spyros A. Sofos
republished from the Edge Hill University Institute for Social Responsibility website

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 2018 presidential election victory appeared to seal his party’s domination over Turkey’s politics until the end of his term in 2023, or even 2028. Since this victory however, he has presided over an ailing economy. The Turkish lira has plummeted, foreign reserves have shrunk as the Central bank intervened to stabilise the currency, and external debt mounted until Qatar, in May 2020 gave the country’s economy a temporary reprieve.

Concurrently, a number of “rising stars” are waiting in the wings. These include the, 2019 İstanbul mayoral election winner, Ekrem İmamoğlu, and former Erdoğan ally Ali Babacan. They are both preparing for the post-Erdoğan era by cultivating their charisma and political capital, causing concerns over Erdoğan’s re-election chances.

Erdoğan sought to deflect attention from the country’s woes through a controversial hard power projection exercise. Turkey’s involvement in Syria where it is responsible for the administration of territories it has occupied, its military presence in Libya, and Iraqi Kurdistan, and its Blue Homeland maritime doctrine have all been presented within the country as evidence of Turkey’s regional strength.

It was against this backdrop that the COVID-19 pandemic reached Turkey. From the outset, the government sought to take narrative control of the spread of the virus in order to mitigate the potential cost and to deflect criticisms that might give an advantage to its opponents.

Erdoğan, reluctant to introduce a full lockdown, called for businesses to stay open and keep the economy’s “wheels turning“, and the government was slow in implementing measures that would hurt the fragile economy, and its own survival.

As unions accused it of disregarding the risk to workers, and Turkey’s reporting of COVID-19 cases was scrutinized by experts who suggested that cases and fatalities were underreported, the government took punitive measures to control criticism.

Medical personnel were reprimanded for speaking out on social media. 410 people were detained for “provocative and abusive” posts, including seven journalists, and TV channels were fined for their coverage, including Habertürk, whose medical expert insinuated that there were many undiagnosed cases, far exceeding confirmed case figures.

Such measures, combined with the government’s control of Turkey’s main media allowed Erdoğan to project an image of strong leadership and claim global recognition for Turkey’s contribution in combatting the pandemic. Erdoğan launched a donation campaign to support the needy, while he blocked a similar drive by his rival Ekrem İmamoğlu, to starve him of public attention.

Pro-government media praised Turkey’s pandemic management, benefits and social support measures, the construction of two pandemic hospitals “within 45 days”, and the government’s “Economic Stability Shield” programme. Focus was also placed on the government’s preferred power projection narrative of Turkey as a global actor, highlighting Turkey’s sending of medical supplies, personal protective equipment, medicines and ventilators to hard-pressed countries, and their expressions of gratitude.

Erdoğan’s control of the pandemic narrative seems to be paying dividends, with his approval rating recovering from February’s 41.1 percent to 55.8 percent in March with his “strong leadership” projection appealing to supporters from the opposition parties.

COVID-19 has revealed that Turkish voters might be attracted to “strong leadership” more than “democratic promise” and has, perhaps, dismissed rumours of the demise of populism as no more than wishful thinking.

The Turkish election as a warning against the irresistible charms of populism

2018-07-15T21:28:00.001+01:00

Originally published in openDemocracy #RethinkingPopulism

by Spyros A. Sofos

RETHINKING POPULISM.; At a time when new political actors are mounting electoral and increasingly systemic challenges to contemporary democracies in the name of the people, there is little consensus in what the phenomenon is among academics, political activists and citizens alike. openDemocracy has been featuring articles on populist phenomena for some years (Mudde, Rovira Kaltwasser, Mouffe, Marlière, Pappas, Skodo, Sofos, Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, Gerbaudo, Gandesha, Tamás to name but a few) and has been successful in stimulating a recurring interest. But despite or perhaps because of the extensive and thought-provoking research on populism, the term has come to denote a range of widely diverse phenomena.
Our aim is to bring together voices that don’t often interact, either because they belong to different fields of work, or as a result of geographical distance, to contribute to a vigorous and constructive debate and the cross-fertilization of different strands within the populism theoretical oeuvre. This is not only in pursuit of theoretical and conceptual clarity, but it is also an issue of practical urgency if we are to develop effective, progressive political strategies.

In his article discussing the Turkish presidential and parliamentary election of 24 June, Omer Tekdemir provides an interesting evaluation of the positions and discourse of the three major contenders; the ‘left-leaning populist’ – as he characterizes it – ‘Peoples’ Democracy Party’ (HDP), the Kemalist secular populist ‘Republican Peoples’ Party’ (CHP) and the right-wing conservative populist, ‘Justice and Development Party’ (AKP). Identifying a number of qualitative differences between the contenders, Tekdemir does not hesitate to call them all populist.

This constitutes a thought-provoking contribution to the relevant debate, worth engaging with for a number of reasons. First, it prompts us to think the very complex case of Turkey, a society with a long tradition of extraparliamentary governance (i.e. army interventions, tutelary restrictions to democratic governance), usually legitimized through appeals to a transcendental national will and unity, using the lens of the theory(ies) of populism, at a critical juncture when so-called populist parties and leaders seem to be setting the tune of political developments worldwide.

Second, it implicitly, yet clearly, suggests that in such a society an effective challenge to the hegemony of the ‘conservative populist’ AKP and its leader can be mounted through a progressive populist response. And – although in passing – it recognizes in the attempt of Jeremy Corbyn to reconfigure Labour and progressive politics in the UK a similar radical democratic populist agenda, a potential blueprint for a democratizing populism of the left.Drawing on a rich theoretical tradition, namely the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on radical democracy, Tekdemir adopts a version of ‘[t]he discursive hegemonic approach of Laclau [that] identifies populism as something that constructs the political in terms of the people (the underdog) versus elites (the establishment)’, hastening to add that, of course, populism ‘can either further or frustrate democratic ends’. However, as my own understanding of populism largely draws (eclectically) on the same theoretical tradition, I believe we can go further in doing justice to the richness and complexity of Laclau’s argument in its application to the example of Turkey. Moreover, my aim in this discussion is to take up the challenge of Tekdemir’s argument as an opportunity to think aloud about the state of our engagement with populism not only as academics, but also as activists and citizens.

Tekdemir’s argument

Premised on a discussion of the contenders’ discursive strategies, Tekdemir is not alone in suggesting that all three have adopted a populist discourse. Emre Erdoğan, Tuğçe Erçetin and Jan Philipp Thomeczek also point out the prevalence of a populist rhetoric as far as the aforementioned parties and their leaderships are concerned. And like them, Tekdemir argues that the AKP discourse displays exclusionary themes, as opposed to the discourses of its rivals, and identifies several interesting qualitative differences between the contenders.

Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, he argues, for example, that the HDP’s populist discourse is qualitatively different from that of its political adversaries as it ‘established a chain of equivalence between its diverse components without essentialising Kurdish identity over other alliances, using radical democracy as a common point of affiliation’, expressing ‘the demands of diverse groups … in an inclusive left-wing populism’. He contrasts this sub-genre of populism, to the more conservative and authoritarian one of the AKP that employed the discourse of ‘the People’ against the Kemalist status quo, before giving it later a more religious, and recently a nationalist emphasis. Tekdemir juxtaposes this brand of populism to what he intriguingly calls ‘the humanitarian populist leadership’ of CHP candidate, Muharrem İnce that, in his opinion, represents a ‘successful social democratic populism’ although, unfortunately, he does not elaborate on this ‘populist’ current.Complicating the situation, to his distinction between the populisms of the AKP, CHP and HDP, Tekdemir adds a further example, that of the Gezi protest movement which he paradoxically defines as ‘an irregular, populist social movement [that] rejected the existing representative democracy … as the mass of ordinary people … were not represented by the elitist centre-right and centre-left parties’.

Despite the nuanced character of these interventions, Tekdemir’s, as well as, to a lesser extent, Erdoğan, Erçetin and Thomeczek’s discussion referred to above, seem to identify virtually every expression of collective action in Turkish politics as populist. Why is that? Is populism endemic in Turkish politics? Does it constitute a dominant trope of articulating interests, demands, fears and aspirations? One would argue both yes and no depending on one’s definition of populism and, indeed, there are many available to choose from.To be fair, Tekdemir hints at more elements of a definition that are worth considering – and these provide very interesting signposts for a debate on populism. He identifies the centrality of the notion of equivalence, a notion that is often used rather descriptively without consideration of its implications for the way political identities work; he interestingly implies that Erdoğan, İnce and Demirtaş, the imprisoned co-chair of the HDP, are all ‘in some sense’ unequivocally charismatic, or at least ‘charming’, although he leaves the reader in suspense as to the location and role, if any at all, of charisma in his theoretical toolkit. In this respect, his fourth example, Gezi, must fail to qualify, given the lack of a clearly identifiable leadership that could display such charms. So again, we need to refine our terms. Finally, the article points out the indeed interesting ambiguity between the CHP’s institutional/vertical politics and the ‘individual/horizontal populist’ style of leadership of its presidential candidate, Muharrem İnce – a discrepancy that also begs for further discussion on the relationship of organizations and leaderships and their respective discursive logics, as well as the roles of mediation and representation in populist politics.

Turkey is indeed a challenging case that can lure researchers to the appeal of a minimal (as proposed by Cas Mudde) understanding of populism, but also to the comfort of a conceptual/terminological laxity, I would argue, that deprives the concept of the critical edge and the political utility that it should, in my opinion, have. If, following Ben Stanley as well as Mudde, we accept that populism is in practice a complementary ideology, one that 'does not so much overlap with, as diffuse itself throughout full [sic] ideologies’, we may end up with a theoretical framework that renders any reference to the people as part of a binary understanding of the political sufficient to qualify as populist. But what would happen if we were to probe a little more rigorously into the modalities of the construction of ‘the people’ and then discuss which of these may justifiably make sense being labelled ‘populist’?

What is more, in a system where the election of an executive president relies on securing the support of an absolute majority of the electorate, candidates are compelled to forge coalitions that will bring together diverse political constituencies and to develop a language and a logic that will ensure the coherence and durability of the latter. This can be a populist language that will reproduce antagonistic understandings of the political field, where adversaries are seen as enemies with irreconcilable and mutually incompatible interests, and that will privilege, as Mudde argues ‘the people’ as the incarnation of a general will – and, I would add, a concomitant notion of collective, as opposed to particularistic or individual, rights and interests.

On the other hand, alternative popular, yet not populist discourses can deploy a language that recognizes ‘the popular’ as diverse, compatible with the existence of particularistic interests, the product of continual processes of construction of shared horizons and solidarities where the ‘other’ is a mere adversary. In this case, I would argue – and of course, this is open to debate, thin definitions of populism like the one identified above, in the first case, serve as labels with insufficient conceptual depth or political utility.

To return to the examples used by Tekdemir, whereas the AKP/MHP ‘People’s Coalition’ advocates without any inhibition a host of punitive administrative, judicial and extra-institutional measures to effectively destroy, symbolically and/or physically, anyone who contradicts the ‘national will’ and brands ‘others’ as terrorists and enemies (purges and vilification already intensifying a few days after the election), I have difficulty considering as similarly populist the more pluralistic discourse of the HDP. Indeed the latter is largely devoid of the conspiratorial, phobic elements of the discourse of the ‘People’s Coalition’ that prioritizes and validates national unity and homogeneity (premised on ethnicity or religion) at the expense of particularistic and individual rights.

The same can be argued about the unity, or rather solidarity, encapsulated in the so-called Gezi spirit. Indeed, the latter was definitely not perceived in timeless and transcendental terms but was understood and experienced as something akin to what Ernest Renan called a daily plebiscite, a tense yet creative coexistence continually tested and reaffirmed and premised on respect for difference. As I have argued elsewhere, Gezi was a fluid and multifaceted movement/moment characterized by a multicentric culture of contestation, a shared and constantly and openly negotiated universe of discourse and action.

This does not of course deny the thread that provided some degree of coherence through this polyphonic universe, the interaction and formation of shared frameworks that make the diversity of the experiences of protesting participants intelligible and relevant to individuals and groups that would otherwise be ‘relative strangers’. Indeed, the symbolic and material violence exercised by the government largely shaped the attitudes, perceptions and actions of those protestors and provided the raw material for the construction of shared injustice frames and a clear divide between the protesters and the regime.

But, having said that, the distinctive quality of this – momentary – achieved togetherness cannot justify subsuming Gezi in the same political subspecies of populism as the AKP/MHP coalition or even that of the CHP/İYİ/Saadet Parti. My scepticism regarding such a line of argumentation extends considerably beyond the actual case of Gezi. It relates to the need to develop theoretically and historically informed definitions that can allow us to explore critically the phenomenon of populism in an array of societies beyond Turkey. Tekdemir himself points out that Gezi has been compared to the anti-austerity mobilizations, the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements, all different instances of collective action, in different contexts but bearing some similarities worth considering.

The Turkish case with its prolonged transition from Kemalism to a post-Kemalist era, with multiple elections impacting on political discourse, with the frequent recourse of political actors to extra-institutional legitimation, with a cult of messianic leadership and the primacy of the collective rights of the nation embedded in its political culture provides a fertile ground both for the study but also for the misrecognition of populism. Tekdemir’s approach, in my opinion, therefore opens up an interesting discussion on the utility of our current theoretical toolkit, its utility and its limitations.

Re-thinking populism: a tentative agenda

This allows the researcher to recognize populist traits in diverse movements and types of mobilization, and even potentially classify grassroots (or square) movements such as Gezi as populist. Such an approach recognizes a political Zeitgeist increasingly characteristic of the current conjuncture. It also implies that the success story of populist mobilizations need not be exclusively a property of authoritarian or conservative leaderships but can be emulated by the left as long as the popular is defined in progressive, democratic terms. This is something implicit in another important current in the study of populism epitomized in the work of Chantal Mouffe whose latest book, For a Left Populism has just been released. Drawing on Laclau’s earlier work on populism as well as their work on radical democracy, Mouffe argues in favour of a qualitatively different populism that will be best placed to counter and challenge reactionary, xenophobic versions of populism as well as inherently undemocratic, neoliberal technocratic political modes of governance, suggesting that populism ‘is not an ideology or a political regime, and cannot be attributed to a specific programmatic content. It is compatible with different forms of government. It is a way of doing politics which can take various forms, depending on the periods and the places. It emerges when one aims at building a new subject of collective action – the people – capable of reconfiguring a social order lived as unfair’.

My own scepticism lies in the fact that both dominant trends in the current discussion on populism, despite their distinct significant contributions, privilege form over content. It is sufficient for any of those adhering to their definitions to ‘cry populism’ as soon as a political actor adopts a rhetoric that distinguishes the pure people (incarnating a general will) from the corrupt elites. Yet, one could wonder, is this ‘thin ideology’ trope sufficient to make sense of populism? Is populism just an aggregate of beliefs in the goodness of the people, the corruption of the elites and the sanctity of the general will? Is it only tantamount to the deployment of a rhetoric that reflects that? Mudde himself is clear. Different populists and different populisms adopt different styles of government and different policies, so there is no use looking further afield from whatever fulfils his minimal definition. And Mouffe’s point about the centrality of discursively ‘reconfiguring a social order lived as unfair’ does not do justice to the different ways in which subjects of collective action can be imagined and constructed.

A similar understanding of ‘populism as discourse’ or ‘rhetoric’ is also suggested by Ruth Wodak. However she hastens to stress that the term, as she uses it, refers to a rhetoric of exclusion and what I would call the discursive construction of fear, mainly characteristic of the politics of right-wing populist parties that endorse nationalistic, nativist, and chauvinistic beliefs, embedded – explicitly or coded – in common sense appeals to a presupposed shared knowledge of ‘the people’. Despite certain reservations which I will outline in the remainder of this note, I tend to find more mileage in this latter approach as it allows us to construct a more rigorous definition of populism that does not exhaust itself in the realm of rhetoric but probes into the material dimensions of discourse – exclusion and the processes of construction of societal insecurity.

Taking my cue from Tekdemir’s attempt to make sense of the complex terrain of Turkish politics at a period of intense polarization, and from the different theoretical propositions sketched above, I am suggesting that even though we are witnessing the emergence of a populist Zeitgeist worldwide, we run the danger of developing conceptual and operational definitions of populism that do not meet the theoretical challenges of the phenomenon or the political exigencies of our time.

Yet there are sufficient commonalities in what appears to be a cacophonic universe made up by exclusivist movements and parties that construct definitions of the situation along phobic lines, to compel us to develop a deeper theory and a more clearly demarcated concept of populism. This would allow us to draw a clear line between populist politics and a ‘skin-deep’ rhetoric that is inspired by the emergence and relative success of populist movements as in the case of the adoption of some aspects of populist discourse by mainstream political parties as I have suggested elsewhere.

There is no doubt of the utility of the existing theoretical frameworks. What we need however is a rigorous and constructive debate on how we can develop an understanding of populism that has a critical edge and a conceptual definition that adequately situates the latter vis a vis other concepts and conceptual frameworks.

As already mentioned, the binary modality of constructing the people v its ‘Other’ is more or less universally accepted within the debate. Where there is no clarity, however, is regarding the type of this binary divide running through the political. Would such a divide reproduce understandings whereby political adversaries are seen as effective foes (to use Carl Schmitt’s terminology) with irreconcilable and mutually incompatible interests that need to be silenced rather than engaged with? Would ‘the people’ be identified in this context as the incarnation of a general will, a vehicle for reifying and naturalizing collective, as opposed to particularistic or individual, rights and interests? Would such modalities make citizenship dependent on belonging in a collectivity incarnating the general will such as, say, the national community, as in the interesting Turkish case but also in that of Nordic welfare chauvinism, to bring two, at first sight, distinct examples, together? Or are other less acute juxtapositions of the people and its ‘others’ (I use lower case this time on purpose), that can still allow room for the expression of social diversity, also populist?

Another area for exploration is the identification of populism’s polar opposites that Mudde has rightly introduced into the research agenda. Indeed, his identification of elitism and pluralism at the antipodes of populism is very useful. Yet, I would argue, it does not entertain the possibility that anti-elitism might be the opposite of populism at the level of rhetoric, but anti-pluralism and anti-particularism might be its opposite at the level of tangible, material political action and of governance – the terrain where actual opponents are excluded, silenced or repressed. In fact, I would go as far as to suggest that anti-elitism might often obscure the anti-institutional, anti-particularistic aspects of populism and its inherent ‘aversion’ towards assertions of social diversity.

Another area of potential disagreement relates to the prioritization of a thin definition of populism as an ideology (as opposed to Kurt Weyland’s preference for ‘political strategy’) proposed by Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (although similar alternatives include Rogers Brubaker’s ‘populism as a discursive and stylistic repertoire’). First, I would argue that a thin definition runs the danger of reducing the concept to a mere catch-all term. The emphasis on ideology on the grounds that the endurance of populism is linked to both supply-side and demand side factors, although not unreasonable, is convincing only if our understanding of politics is structured on the basis of a strict division between governing elites (suppliers) and governed constituencies or masses (those who articulate demand), something that underestimates the complexity of the political process where populist discourse is articulated both at grassroots and elite levels and takes shape as a result of complex processes of social construction, involving numerous actors and multiple modalities of translation and negotiation (I refer to these briefly a little later on).

Second, a thin definition does not allow us to establish and test at the level of operational definitions populism’s correlation – noted by Wodak – with anti-liberal but, I would argue, also anti-institutional and extra-institutional politics. Research on Turkey is once more relevant here as Şakir Dinçşahin examines the anti- and extra- institutional discourse of the AKP. But examples come also from further afield.

As again suggested by the case of Turkey, as well as that of Latin American populist movements in the second half of the twentieth century, or even the postcommunist nationalist movements of the late 1980s and 90s – we may need to be more attentive to the frequent, although not unavoidable coupling of populism with charismatic (and I would add ‘unitary’) types of political leadership and, at the level of governance, preference for executive presidential systems or systems where a unitary leadership is seen as preferable to the more ‘corrupt’ and ‘divisive’ representative character of parliamentary systems.

Margaret Canovan also notes the overwhelming dependence of ‘new populist movements’ on personal leadership rather than institutional party structures and I would argue that there is at least a symbolic logic in this preferred leadership modality given the effective redundancy of institutions representing social diversity in a political imaginary where the people possesses one will and demands to exercise ‘its’ sovereignty. Some theorists will however argue that there is not sufficient evidence to warrant such a concern as contemporary populist parties are accepting the rules of parliamentary democracy and leaders depend on their party organizations. I would retort that most ‘populist’ actors are still relative newcomers in established parliamentary systems and, it is only in their consolidation phase (as the cases of Poland and Hungary seems to suggest) that they are able to act as outright systemic challengers.

Similar conclusions can be drawn from the trajectory of the AKP in Turkey which, prior to its consolidation, was an ardent supporter of the country’s fragile parliamentary system, only to slide rapidly and violently towards a personalized, presidential leadership model. Debates on the potential extra-institutional dimension of populist politics should also encompass legitimation avenues free of the mediation of parliamentary procedural ‘niceties’ as in cases of street democracy in Milosevic’s Serbia or the appeals of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to the national will against supreme court decisions, or to the people in the recent past, to mention just a few examples.

Another important terrain that needs to be explored is that of the genealogy of populism. Several scholars have attempted to pinpoint the moment populist movements emerge or ideologies are articulated and/or the symbolic and cultural archives upon which they are built. Some have identified as necessary conditions the unfolding of crises. Andrea Pirro and Paul Taggart unproblematically see what they call the Great Recession, the migrant crisis, and Brexit as necessary preconditions for the ascendance of Eurosceptic, populist forces in Europe over the past few years, while Hanspeter Kriesi and Takis Pappas advance a similar argument. Indeed the very notion of crisis as a precondition for the emergence of populism, as well as the rigid supply v demand distinction is in urgent need of reconsideration. As I mentioned above, literature on collective action and mobilization has made considerable advances in the study of the social construction of injustice, agency and identity, and on the production of societal insecurity and the securitization of migration flows, as well as in cultural alterity in Europe. The theoretical discussion on populism and the notions of injustice and crisis have largely remained untouched by this literature and its potentially radical implications in terms of integrating into our understanding of populism (i) the construction and making sense of crises, (ii) the role of the discursive construction of fear and insecurity, (iii) the role of emotions as well as the (iv) impact of established cultural and discursive archives and repertoires in this process.

There are many more issues that could be added to any agenda comprehensively reconsidering the concept of populism in the current moment, but I will restrict myself to one final question that I have touched upon throughout this discussion; can there be a progressive populism?

I have argued that such latitude risks undermining the explanatory capacity of the concept of populism as this has developed over the past couple of decades, or even longer. My concern is not of a normative nature but one of conceptual efficacy. It is true that, underlying the work of Laclau and of Mouffe, has always been the question of how the Left could articulate a viable and progressive populism. Mouffe’s For a Left Populism can be read as such a theoretically informed programmatic text. What distinguishes left populism, says Mouffe, is ‘that “the people” is constructed democratically rather than on the basis of nation or race. With good strategic leadership, a radically democratic and egalitarian movement can be a match for nativism’. Tekdemir himself recognizes in HDP, Gezi and Corbyn’s Labour party Left populist experiments along these lines and suggests that even İnce’s discourse represents a potentially progressive form of Social Democratic populism.

Depending on the definition of populism one adopts, one can debate if a left variant is possible, and if it is useful to call attempts to construct a popular subject of collective action, or to develop politics of solidarity, populist. At the end of the day the question is where does ‘the progressive’ lie? – in a unified progressive, or revolutionary subject, or in a diverse solidaristic ‘coming together’ of movements and other political actors respecting difference and internal dialogue?

So, Canovan’s argument that central to populism in our democracies is an intricate balancing act between on the one hand pragmatism – manifesting itself in their institutional frameworks and their complex rulebooks and practices of negotiation and compromise – and on the other the redemptive impatience inherent in the wish to be sovereign (important in revitalizing political systems that can otherwise become ossified) is, in my opinion, a deeply problematic one. Although I cannot disregard the prevailing argument that the appeal to a sovereign ‘people’ in populism is in essence a democratic one, I would say that populism shares with democratic politics the demand for sovereignty of the citizenry but imagines this citizenry in a fundamentally different way.

I therefore disagree with her implication that the most privileged locus for the revitalization of our democracies lies in redemptive politics – notably, in a dose of populism. A redemptive politics characterized by frustration at the rigidities of political institutions and the painstaking character of negotiating and building solidarities, a politics of sovereignty marked by the yearning for the excitement of unmediated spontaneity and the warmth of social homogeneity is not necessarily, in my opinion, an element of democratic politics, but at best, to paraphrase Lenin, an infantile disorder of democracy. This is surely especially the case if its underlying political imaginary supports understanding citizenship in exclusivist terms and as dependent on belonging to an undifferentiated ‘people’.

Instead of talking about progressive populism, perhaps progressive forces need to engage in more complex visions of developing solidarities, dialogue and of renewing democracies through a multitude of public spaces where power would be rendered visible and negotiable as Alberto Melucci has argued.

But, at the end of the day this is precisely why we urgently need a constructive and open dialogue between different strands of thought within the populism theoretical ouevre. The theoretical and political dilemmas the Turkish case presents serve as a valuable warning of the seductiveness of populism and of construing any attempt to construct a sense of popular unity or front as populism at a time when it is imperative for us as academics, activists and citizens alike to make sense of the spectre of populism, if we are to develop progressive political strategies.

We are clearly at an important juncture, both theoretically and politically. There is broad consensus on some of the characteristics of populism as most theorists understand it nowadays. This relates to the minimal definition as proposed by key contributors in the debate such as Mudde who see populism as more or less a ‘thin ideology that considers society to be essentially divided between two antagonistic and homogeneous groups, the pure people and the corrupt elite, and wants politics to reflect the general will of the people’.

Cypriot hopes for unification are on life support, but not doomed

2018-01-22T21:01:00.001+00:00

Originally published in The Conversation

Just over two decades ago, Sophia and Mehmet met at a North London party. She, originally from Deryneia in the southern part of Cyprus, had just arrived to study at Middlesex University. He, born in Gazimağusa in Northern Cyprus, had joined his uncle’s family in London a little earlier. They almost immediately fell in love with each other. Soon after I met them in June 1997, Sophia told me that falling in love with each other seemed an almost impossible feat. After all, a shared life back in Cyprus would have been fraught with challenges.

At the time, Sophia and Mehmet didn’t realise that back in Cyprus, the distance between the houses they grew up in was just over a mile – that they had on countless occasions watched the very same sunrise while looking for crabs at the same beach, divided only by a fence of barbed wire.

They grew up in two different worlds, where distances were not measured in the same way as elsewhere. Geographical proximity in Cyprus was negated by an impenetrable, frozen border. It had divided their island since 1974, when Turkey invaded in response to a Greece-backed military coup.

Until border crossing points were opened in 2003, Cypriots had few chances to meet people living on the other part of their island – and their awareness of what was happening there was largely shaped by state propaganda.

For Greek Cypriots, the official narrative focused on the Turkish invasion, with little mention of the campaign by the Greek paramilitary EOKA B – an organisation that divided the island for more than a decade before it was officially partitioned by military means. It forced Turkish Cypriots to flee and settle in enclaves in their very own homeland. It ripped communities apart.

Barbed wire in Famagusta, Cyprus. Shutterstock

As far as the Turkish side was concerned, the behaviour of EOKA B legitimised the formation of the paramilitary Turkish Resistance Organisation (TMT), and gave Turkey the opportunity to extend its control over the Turkish Cypriots. Many had sought refuge in the north, afraid of becoming second-class citizens in their own country or even being expelled – just as the Cretan Muslims had been a mere 50 years earlier.

The official Turkish Cypriot discourse encouraged by Turkish nationalists capitalised on and institutionalised that fear. It revolved around the systematic commemoration of atrocities by Greek Cypriot nationalists, emphasising the importance of Turkey as the “motherland” upon which Turkish Cypriots had called on for their salvation. And above all, it stifled any calls for coexistence.

In this environment of fear and suspicion, the memory of coexistence, with its positive and fraught moments alike, has faded over time. Older Cypriots passed away without the chance to return to the homes they fled or reconnect with old friends on the other side. Until 2003 “neutral” places outside Cyprus were the only places where Cypriots can meet each other, be exposed to each other’s partial truths and memories, fears and aspirations. They were the only places where they could form bonds of friendship and solidarity.

Hope springs

The protracted impasse has apparently worn out the segments of the electorate that previously supported reunification, and talk of full-on partition is no longer taboo in either side of the divide.

In the Turkish Cypriot parliamentary election of January 7 2018, the north’s nationalist right gathered strength; in the south, the rejectionist nationalists who derailed the Annan peace plan back in 2004, are gaining appeal in advance of the January 28 presidential vote.

The Peace and Freedom Museum in Kyrenia, Northern Cyprus, was established in honour of the soldiers who lost their lives in 1974. Shutterstock

But Cyprus is small – and its divided states are both weak and vulnerable. The 2013 banking crisis left deep wounds in the south, exposing its fragile development model. The north, meanwhile, is internationally isolated and heavily dependent on Turkey. Unification, it seems, could only benefit the island’s economy, not least by transforming the island’s natural resources from a political flashpoint into a shared source of wealth.

This is not the 1960s. Today, for all its faults, EU membership provides a safer environment in which Cypriots can consolidate peace and accommodate each other’s aspirations and fears. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy, and recent efforts underscore that there’s a long way to go.

Northern Cyprus border. Shutterstock

In 2017, efforts to achieve a breakthrough were renewed. Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders, the foreign ministers of the guarantor powers (Turkish, Greek and British), and the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy tried to resuscitate the UN-sponsored talks on reunification – but while they reached a broad agreement, the devil was in the detail. In the end, the parties reverted to form, flexing their muscles and rehashing the same positions that had led to previous impasses.

With elections on both sides of the border this year, the future of the island is up in the air. But there’s still hope for a different Cyprus, one free of the symbolic and physical violence expressed in the language of “motherlands”. A Cyprus whose citizens, treated as adults, will not need barricades and buffer zones to feel safe; one where crossing streets, forming friendships and falling in love will not require permits from military authorities or approval by communal leaders.

To make this happen, a new Cyprus will have to develop institutions to address fears and mistrust, making armies and intervention clauses redundant. But in the end, once a modus vivendi of some sort is established, it will be up to Cypriots to make their island a common homeland once again.

In memoriam or A Kurdish Woman in a Turkish Dystopia

2016-02-12T06:32:00.001+00:00

As I came across today a set of deeply disturbing photographs of Turkish soldiers having stripped off the clothes of a young Kurdish girl after killing her, posing with her naked body, shared on social media, I remembered Klaus Theweleit's book Männerphantasien (1977), translated in English ten years later as Male Fantasies.

In this unique book, Theweleit, provides an insightful analysis of the proto-fascist consciousness of the Freikorps fighters who roamed the Weimar Republic during the interwar period to fight communists and 'other' enemies. Their ambivalent but, at their core, deeply misogynistic attitudes were central in their worldview and eventually formed one of the cornerstones of national socialist ideology as it was eagerly adopted by the Nazi party and, later on, by state discourse and policy.

The Turkish state, waging war against its own Kurdish citizens allows and encourages similar fantasies to be enacted at the 'battleground' and buttresses its legitimacy by integrating them to its misogynistic ideology. ‪The photographs of the body of a killed, an apparently Kurdish girl, stripped represent a fusion:
- of the fantasies of sexually frustrated young men, conscripts in an army that inculcates them with a conservative ideology that turns the often unattainable object of their sexual desire, woman, into the cause of their frustration.
- of this very conservative, nationalist ideology that turn Kurdish women into the ultimate enemy (already unavailable and frustrating in the men's psyche), threatening the state, the nation and the patriarchal order that underpins them. This is after all a state that until recently was condoning the performance of routine 'virginity' tests on Kurdish and leftist female prisoners for the very same reasons.

Back in the 1990s I had the sad opportunity to witness and document the very same processes of dehumanization of women in the context of the Bosnian war and the devastating effects this had on the societies that were drawn to this conflict. I thought that this was a stark reminder of the need to be vigilant and intolerant to attempts to repeat the same mistakes. Sadly, today we seem to be turning a blind eye to Turkish atrocities as the country is prepared to support the European 'response' to the refugee crisis.

UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Zainab Hawa Bangura has asserted that "(s)exual violence in conflict needs to be treated as the war crime that it is; it can no longer be treated as an unfortunate collateral damage of war" but this is not merely a war crime, it is part of a systematic attempt to turn desire and frustration into part of a political ideology, of a virulent hateful fascist nationalism that treats any type of deviance from the prescribed roles for those it interpellates with extreme prejudice.

In this envisaged Turkish dystopia it is increasingly hard to be a Kurdish woman.

As #Grexit looms in the horizon

2015-07-08T17:46:00.000+01:00

Until yesterday morning I was arguing that although I did not support the 'no' vote I would support the government in its negotiations. I criticized people who were drawn to the vortex of the polarization the referendum had caused and suggested we all needed to look ahead.

Yet, the government itself arrived in Brussels with no proposals. Alexis Tsipras snubbed the European Parliament before he finally accepted to appear there today. He invited the leaders of the Greek political parties in a conference about the country's next moves and called for national unity while winking at those who at the same time vilified figures who supported the 'yes' campaign. The silence that shrouds the inclusion of the half million of nazis who voted no into the 'progressive' 'people' was in sharp contrast with the wanton and determined campaign to bundle together and brand those who voted 'yes' as collaborators of the Germans (resurrecting terms that were used in the Greek civil war).
The proud oxi campaign has dissimulated existing deep divisions in present-day Greece, notably between those allied to or supported by the state and those who are left to fend for themselves in the wilderness of the private job market, those who are safely employed and a generation of young adults that have never been economically active.
The country is obliviously sliding into the abyss. To the manual of Europe of multiple speeds Mr Tsipras has added a reverse gear. SYRIZA has mesmerised domestic and international audiences alike by claiming it is the incarnation of Europe's left reflexes and the voice of resistance. It has done so though by choosing a nationalist idiom and by working to bring the changes it wants to bring (whatever these are) in the context of 'one country' - one that will soon be economically and politically isolated if things keep on developing as they are now. SYRIZA's leadership has consistently disregarded the possibility of Europe being the battlefield for change, not in the form of one state challenging the others but in the form of building political and social alliances, not in the form of requiring war reparations but of building common futures.
It requires solidarity selectively - it has conveniently forgotten that Germany has been the major country that financed the structural funds that have been pouring into Greece since the 1980s but has stubbornly chosen to remember and remind the role of the Germans in WWII. It claims that present and future generations should not be held responsible for the debts accrued by older ones but asks that principle to be waived in the case of Germany.
In short, what I see behind this government's proud anti-neoliberal discourse is a short-sighted isolationist and nationalist obsession. To the neoliberal argument that punitive austerity is the solution its own response is that proud isolation is the solution. In both cases the question is what kind of poverty is the Greek people going to be condemned to and therefore I will not take any of the two, thank you. At least living outside Greece I have the choice but I am really concerned about millions of people who live there like my family and close friends who will have to live with the consequences.

Greferendum: an anthology

2015-07-02T20:09:00.000+01:00

Why I will be voting YES in Sunday’s Greek referendum - a piece that appeared in openDemocracy

2015-07-01T18:14:00.000+01:00

published in openDemocracy on 1 July 2015

The announcement of the decision of the prime minister of Greece in the early hours of last Saturday, to hold a referendum on whether Greece should accept the draft agreement of a new debt relief programme or not, took me by surprise.

Having been active in the Eurocommunist Left of the 1980s I was aware that the claims that SYRIZA saw itself as an upholder of that pro-European Left tradition were largely exaggerated, but despite my private doubts on this issue, I did not expect the agenda of the party to include the possibility of an exit from the Eurozone and, more importantly, a profound clash with Greece’s European partners.

So, last Saturday morning, as I was frantically going through news stories about the Greek debt crisis and what appeared to be the collapse of the negotiations between Greece and its creditors I came across various explanations about what had transpired.

Tsipras, some reports said, had been humiliated when his partners/creditors started annotating the document he had submitted with red ink as if he were a student in front of his irate and cruel teachers. As the Greek Prime Minister himself stared into the camera in his post-midnight address, he said that the 5 July referendum was to record the response of the Greek people to the “strict and humiliating austerity” proposed by the institutions. He urged the electorate to “respond to authoritarianism and harsh austerity with democracy”. He then resorted to familiar clichés about Greece being the birthplace of democracy, and that the popular choice would honour the country’s history and send a message of dignity worldwide.

Leaving the clichés aside – my generation grew up suspicious of such patriotic hype – I could very much agree with the fact that the negotiations with the European partners had degenerated into attempts to cajole the Greek government into signing up to a blueprint that blatantly ignored the opinion of the not-negligible portion of the electorate that voted for SYRIZA, and its right-wing Eurosceptic government partner, the Independent Greeks. I would not at all dispute furthermore that SYRIZA’s argument that the obsession of Greece’s creditors with a punishing regime of austerity was counterproductive – indeed five years of punitive spending cuts and taxation regime had brought economic dislocation and chaos to the economy, precluding any possibility of development in the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, the creditors were also shocked at the Greek unilateral decision to leave the negotiation table and announce a referendum. For them, this was proof that the government was in bad faith and intending to reject what they saw as a reasonable and constructive offer, the manifestation of their solidarity with the Greek people at such a difficult moment. They took every opportunity to point out that the Greek side had squandered any opportunity they were given to come up with concrete and constructive proposals, and to complain that Greek ministers were in the habit of lecturing their counterparts.

The opinions of experts were equally divided. For example economics Nobel laureates such as Krugman and Stiglitz who recommend a no vote in contrast to their fellow laureate Pissarides who urges a yes vote were the most notable instances of a unbridgeable divide among financial analysts, politicians and policy makers. The arguments were split. On the one hand, there were those that decoupled a no vote from the possibility of Grexit or stressed the potency of a no vote as a negotiating tool or, finally, saw in grexit the possibility of Greece regaining its lost economic sovereignty and being able to plan towards a recovery. On the other, there were other scenarios that saw in Grexit the potential of impoverishment, rationing of essential goods, destruction of health and educational infrastructures; some even went as far as to argue that exit from the Eurozone would mean exit from the EU, international isolation and the undermining of national sovereignty.

What was – and still is - even more confusing, disconcerting and troubling for me are the fundamental disagreements among advocates of the yes and no vote with regards to what is ‘true’ and what constitutes a lie, propaganda or conspiracy.

Among some of my friends and acquaintances statements issued by Eurozone, or European Commission officials or representatives of other governments are offhandedly and unequivocally dismissed as blatant lies, whereas Greek government statements are greeted as honest and truthful, and vice versa.

The way the IMF and our European creditors and partners on the one hand, and successive Greek governments including the current one have been approaching the fiscal crisis has divided Greek society to the extent that trust –interpersonal, social , one can name it in different ways – has become a rare commodity. In this peculiar universe situated in the shadow of the endless back and forth of proposals and counter-proposals and the exchange of recriminations by the parties to the debt crisis negotiations, there are two truths, or rather ‘only one’ but held as such by roughly half of the population whereas the other half upholds an alternative truth.

In such a polarized context the ‘other’ is seen as an a priori liar, disseminating deceit and propaganda. I recently witnessed a discussion by yes supporters about a well known musician arguing for exiting the Eurozone; the exchange could be described at best as hatefilled, his moral integrity, social standing and exemplary artistic qualities were doubted and discounted uncritically because of his particular opinion on this matter. Similarly, supporters of the yes vote are invariably described as stooges of foreign centres, or traitors or fascists (despite the irony of the national socialist Golden Dawn calling for a no vote).

The polarization and the language used to demarcate boundaries, separate people, undermine friendships, evokes memories of the post-civil-war period when Greek society was rigidly divided along a Left/Right axis that penetrated and split neighbourhoods, villages, families and tore apart the social fabric of a war ravaged society. We are clearly living through a traumatic period where simplistic binary divisions dissimulate the complexity of our social and political life, where respect, or at least tolerance towards difference and diversity of opinion gives way to intolerance and mistrust, where disagreement mutates into intense antagonism.

In her essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, Gayatri Spivak draws upon the debates surrounding the 1929 British abolition of the sati, the Hindu custom of widow sacrifice in the funeral pyre of her dead husband, in order to stress the ambiguity inherent in the relationship between the imperialist subject and the subject of imperialism. In a nutshell, Spivak points out that the British colonial intervention could be understood as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’, while the Hindu nativist reaction to it took the form of an assertion by brown men that ‘the brown women actually wanted to die’. While white and brown men fought to represent the interests and voice of Indian women, the latter were nowhere to be found in the debate, their voice remained unheard and their fate decided by others who assumed the role of the colonist and the colonized.

Indeed, public debate in Greece, but also in the lobbies of Brussels, is conducted in very much the same way. The Greek side has been using tropes premised on binaries such as colonist versus colonized (incidentally the current Greek Foreign minister has written a book entitled Debt Colony), them and us to support perceptions of injustice and implacable conflict. The decision to pursue the argument of the German war reparations that cast Greece in the role of the victim and Germany in that of the war criminal is one of the most notable examples of this.

But also, the Greek prime Minister’s tweets are increasingly adopting patriotic or nationalist tones with the creditors/partners described vaguely as ‘they’ and ‘them’, part of an ethereal conspiracy to humiliate the Greeks.

On the other hand, media on the ‘other’ side of the divide such as Der Spiegel and Bild have repeatedly juxtaposed the lazy, credit-dependent Greeks to the hardworking Germans who are taken for a ride. Eurogroup ministers of finance have talked often about the irresponsibility of the Greek side, implying that they themselves were acting responsibly and were beyond reproach.

What happens in this war of attrition between the European creditors and the Greek government is that particular definitions of the situation, opinions and interests are prioritized at the expense of others. In the case of Greek society, the subaltern – to use the terminology proposed by Spivak – become invisible and inaudible. Divides that need to be acknowledged and addressed such as that between the public and private sector workers are barely visible. The government’s red lines in its clash with its creditors include the protection of salaries and pensions in the public sector but hardly acknowledge the need to create the conditions for job security and decent standards of living among private sector employees. Only two days ago a senior SYRIZA cadre dismissed fears that a possible Grexit might decimate private sector jobs by blatantly pointing out that most private sector employees have not been paid for several months, and that the possibility therefore would not represent a notable loss.

Alongside these underprivileged employees stand the unemployed, voiceless, mainly young people who have never had a chance to become economically active as the crisis and its mismanagement by successive Greek governments and their European Union creditors and partners devastated the job market. These are the voiceless current day subalterns who have been underrepresented and ‘on behalf of whom’ the Greek governments and their lenders have been negotiating.

Although the referendum that has been called has been hailed by many a triumph of democracy, it is, in my opinion, yet another mechanism that can render a large part of the electorate voiceless. Because the straightjacket of the choice of one of two options does not allow for the full spectrum of possible opinions to be expressed. The polarization inherent in the invitation to make such a simple yes or no choice leaves us all in a state of aporia as the either/or logic makes it almost impossible to address the variety and diversity of fears, aspirations and opinions we, the electorate may have. And, what is more, how will a no or yes vote be construed? Will no be a vote for grexit? Will it open the way for further negotiation? Will it preclude staying in the Eurozone?

#bettertogether but …
Or, conversely, to demonstrate my own personal aporia; would my yes vote indicate that I accept capitulation to the wishes of the creditors and partners, and that I opt for a regime of austerity that punishes ordinary people but rewards banks for recklessly funding the bottomless pit of the Greek state with capital they never had. Would it support a Eurozone that works primarily to ensure bank solvency - that is where most of the bailout funds have gone after all?

Or does it express a wish to remain at the centre of the European unification process (including the Eurozone) as the #bettertogether hashtag suggests? My yes for example is not a yes to the underhand tactics of our partners, tactics that can be construed to be tantamount to attempts to effect regime change. My yes is not a rejection of the argument that SYRIZA articulated that austerity has failed, that austerity constitutes a selective punitive mechanism that ignores the co-responsibility of creditor and borrower and that affects the life chances of real people. It is not an endorsement of the transformation of the core institutions of the European Union into collection agents that demand conformity and compliance or else.

I would vote yes as I do not want my objections to the way the crisis has been managed at home and in Brussels to be usurped by politicians that dream that they can give the Union a bloody nose by destroying the Eurozone or that want to use the woes of my country as an example to be avoided by my fellow Europeans who will be going to the polls later this year to elect a government in Spain and elsewhere – as I said before, trust is at an all-time low and I am not immune to the paranoia this creates.

I would like my yes to serve as the start of the process of regaining my voice as a Greek and a European citizen. As a starting point for reconnecting with other fellow Europeans, for hearing them and for being heard, for meeting relative strangers in our common home and seeking to understand their standpoint and, why not, joining our voices.

Kenan Evren. in lieu of an obituary

2015-05-12T19:36:00.001+01:00

I was in Turkey during Kenan Evren's violent and excessively repressive coup. I was very young and, coming from a neighbouring country that had experienced its own brutal dictatorship, I was shocked by the indiscriminate brutality of the takeover of power. The extreme violence of the coup cannot be justified by the argument, however true, that it gave an end to widespread social unrest and violent conflict.

Indeed, it should not be forgotten that Evren institutionalised state violence, treated human life as expendable, penalized not only actual engagement in the violence that had marked Turkey's urban landscapes, but also what he and his accomplices deemed to be 'subversive thinking'. Turkey's moderate left was decimated as the ire of the regime was directed more towards them than the Right. The military junta allowed and enhanced the use of demeaning practices such as vengeful systematic torture, 'virginity' tests against 'suspect' women devised to hurt, shame and humiliate, if they were lucky not to be counted among those who lost their lives during the coup and its long aftermath. Brutality and brutalization became normalized in the name of the regime's version of the national interest.A piece in the Guardian suggests that the majority of Turks welcomed the coup, relieved that it brought an end to the vicious circle of extremist violence that had rendered the streets of Turkey into no go areas. There is a grain of truth in that as armed extremist organizations had entered a vicious cycle of urban warfare. However, that is part of the story, a partial truth as Clifford and Marcus would have said. I, instead, saw a society plunged in utter fear, forced to kneel and defer to Evren's vicious, paternalistic impulses. Evren and his accomplices cultivated the myth of salvation they brought to a society that turned tolerance into fratricide. And they, of course expected, or rather demanded this recognition to be redeemed through deference and gratitude. But, normality is something very different from what he brought to Turkey, different from seeing the army in the streets for years, guarding squares, streets, police stations, from having every movement of yours scrutinized by frightened soldiers inculcated with mistrust of any assertion of difference in the public spaces of which they became confused custodians. For the regime, normality did definitely not include what the poor urban workers living in the gecekondular of the rapidly expanding cities of Turkey saw as the prospect of a decent life as the generals sought to silence with extreme prejudice any voice that demanded living wages and social justice. The blueprint of the generals did not stop at the quelling of violence, not even at a slightly longer stabilization period. It involved a massive 'rebooting' of Turkish society, a complex mixture of systematic and systemic violence with persistent social engineering that was intended to culminate in a conservative and apolitical society happy with a tutelary democracy policed by a vengeful and impatient military and its allies in the judiciary and the rest of the state mechanism.

The Constitution he and his accomplices penned and 'approved' by a modest 92% of the electorate, eliminated the few freedoms that had survived the previous coup in 1971. The president (Evren himself) gained the right to dissolve the Assembly and enact laws by decree. Article 14 limited the freedom of individuals and organizations, and prohibits the political struggle based on class, language, race.The somber toll of salvation? Within the first months of the coup, at least 650,000 arrests, 1.683 million people put under surveillance, 7,000 death penalty demands, 517 executions, 50 hangings, 98,400 people sentenced for membership of an illegal organization, 388,000 people had their travel documents cancelled, 30,000 people were forced to go into exile, 171 people died as a result of torture, 937 films were censored, 14,000 people were stripped off their citizenship, 299 people died in prison, 400 journalists were sentenced to a total of four thousand years in prison. 1,680,000 people blacklisted, 230,000 people tried at martial courts: 23,700 foundations closed down and 644 foundations were placed under investigation, 146 suspicious deaths, 16 shot to death while attempting to flee, 74 killed in street clashes, 73 regime opponents who allegedly died of natural causes, 43 alleged suicides, civil servants who faced legal action: 7,245, teachers who faced legal action: 3,854, security force members who faced legal action: 988, academics who faced legal action: 120, judges and prosecutors who faced legal action: 47, sacked public officials: 4,891

Kenan Evren will always be remembered by me as the incarnation of hubris, as a tiny insecure human being who believed that his military uniform made him stand taller than others, and think he could play God at the expense of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of lives that he ruined (records indicate that in the immediate aftermath of the coup 700,000 found themselves in the regime's jails - we still do not know the exact death toll or the indirect victims of this monumental unleashing of state violence, the mothers, the fathers, the wives, the husbands, the children that were left without their loved ones.

Although I do not believe in heaven or hell (apart from the ones we build during our lives on earth) I am tempted to indulge into imagining how a vicious God (probably the one he thought he had become) would create a hell for him.
Kenan Evren you will not be missed; we do not need self appointed saviours, thank you very much.

Landscape in the Mist: SYRIZA and Greek-Macedonian relations

2015-02-11T01:42:00.000+00:00

Cyprus: Perhaps the last chance to end the division

2014-02-07T16:23:00.000+00:00

The Nicosia buffer zone. A wound in the midst of Cyprus

Saying that the story of Cyprus is a story of missed opportunities may be a cliché but could not be truer today.

The rejection of the Annan plan by the Greek-Cypriot electorate back in 2004 undoubtedly damaged the cause of the reunification of the island. The election of Dimitris Christofias to the presidency of the republic in 2008 came too late as Mehmet Ali Talat was facing elections two years later. Both leaders had to face internal challenges. For a start, mending the wounds that the bitter 'anti Annan plan' campaign in the south had inflicted upon the cause of a united Cyprus required time and determination, both of which were in short supply. Talat had to counter the criticisms of an ascendant pro-independence National Unity Party and its leader Derviş Eroğlu who by 2009 was cohabiting with him as prime minister and in 2010 moved to the presidency of the TRNC. Christofias, despite his pro-reunification reflexes, had co-presided over a vehement 'no' campaign during the Papadopoulos years that had badly bruised the forces that could support his rapprochement initiative. He decided to tread carefully and slowly against accusations of recklessness and did not manage to make up the lost ground during his negotiations with Talat. Once Eroğlu succeded him, Christofias realized there was no point in pursuing talks that would leave him vulnerable in the republic and might cost him his reelection prospects - a reelection that at the end of the day slipped away from his grasp as he had to withdraw in the midst of a public outcry over scandals and corruption. By 2012 most commentators had declared the process that had effectively stalled at least a year earlier a failure with the UN Secretary General's special envoy, Alexander Downer, washing his hands.

As a divorce seemed to be the most likely outcome by the end of 2013, Turkey's foreign minister met in Athens with his Greek counterpart to discuss Cyprus just before visiting Northern Cyprus for talks with the Turkish Cypriot leadership. The reasons were many: An embattled Turkish government facing corruption accusations just as it had thought it had put behind it the early summer urban protests needed the boost of opening a new chapter in its EU accession negotiations which have implicitly been linked with Turkey's constructive role in the Cyprus issue. The US concurred that such a development would restore the credibility of the AKP government and would contribute to regional stability at a very tense time. And, of course, the new president of the republic had been elected on a pro-unification ticket.

Although the public statements Davutoğlu and Turkish Cypriot officials made during his Cyprus visit suggested that the Turkish and Turkish Cypriot positions were entrenched, seasoned observers could read between the lines; it was obvious that Turkey was pushing for more flexibility on the part of the Turkish Cypriots.

In the South, president Anastasiades has been trying to overcome the intransigence of opponents of any rapprochement with the North who are still influential in Greek Cypriot politics - including his party's government partners ΔΗΚΟ, especially at a time when domestic economic problems have been at the top of the challenges his administration was facing. In addition, aware of the obstructionist tactics of his potential interlocutor were the intercommunal negotiations to resume, Anastasiades echoed Ban Ki-moon's 2011 reservations and insisted that there was no point to resume dialogue for the sake of dialogue and demanded that the two sides agree on a joint communiqué that set the rules of the game. Although for many this was seen as an unnecessary technicality, it is a significant prerequisite for a process that is running out of steam. The international community is experiencing fatigue and might look for alternative solutions should this round of negotiations meets an impasse. Syria just over 100km to the east has been attracting more attention and is likely to be the focal point of international diplomacy as the conflict unfolds and the humanitarian crisis deepens. A further failure after the Annan plan rejection and the inconclusive Christofias-Talat/Eroğlu process would send the unambiguous message that the parties to the process do not have faith in the prospect of a common future. It seems that the disputed communiqué (leaked below) will be agreed on as the shuttle diplomacy of the UN and US and the tacit support of Turkey indicate. Agreeing on it may well be the last chance Cyprus has. I hope the leaders will rise to the circumstances and will take it.

Draft communiqué

1. The status quo is unacceptable and its prolongation will have negative consequences for the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. The leaders affirmed that a settlement would have a positive impact on the entire region, while first and foremost benefiting Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots, respecting democratic principles, human rights and fundamental freedoms as well as each other’s distinct identity and integrity and ensuring their common future in a united Cyprus within the European Union.

2. The leaders expressed their determination to resume structured negotiations in a results-oriented manner. All unresolved core issues will be on the table and will be discussed interdependently. The leaders will aim to reach a settlement as soon as possible and hold separate simultaneous referenda thereafter.

3. The settlement will be based on a bi-communal, bi-zonal federation with political equality as set out in the relevant Security Council Resolutions and the High Level Agreements. The united Cyprus, as a member of the United Nations and of the European Union, shall have a single, international legal personality and a single sovereignty which is defined as the sovereignty which is enjoyed by all members States of the United Nations, under the UN Charter and which emanates equally from Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. There will be a single united Cyprus citizenship, regulated by federal law. All citizens of the United Cyprus shall also be citizens of either the Greek-Cypriot constituent state or the Turkish-Cypriot constituent state. This status shall be internal and shall complement and not substitute in any way the united Cyprus citizenship.
The powers of the federal government and like matters that are clearly incidental to its specified powers, will be assigned by the constitution. The Federal constitution will also provide for the residual powers to be exercised by the constituent states. The constituent states will exercise fully and irrevocably all their powers free from encroachment by the federal government. The federal laws will not encroach upon constituent state laws within the constituent states’ area of competences and the constituent states’ laws will not encroach upon the federal laws within the federal government’s competences. Any dispute in respect thereof will be adjudicated finally by the Federal Supreme Court. Neither side may claim authority or jurisdiction over the other.

4. The united Cyprus federation shall result from the settlement following the settlement’s approval by separate simultaneous referenda. The Federal constitution shall prescribe that the united Cyprus federation shall be composed of two constituent states of equal status. The bi-zonal, bi-communal nature of the federation and the principles upon which the EU is founded will be safeguarded and respected throughout the island. The Federal constitution shall be the supreme law of the land and will be binding on all the federation’s authorities and on the constituent states. Union in whole or in part with any other country or any form of partition or secession or any other unilateral change to the state of affairs will be prohibited.

5. The negotiations are based on the principle that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.

6. The appointed representatives are fully empowered to discuss any issue at any time and should enjoy parallel access to all stakeholders and interested parties in the process, as needed. The leaders of the two communities will meet as often as needed. They retain the ultimate decision-making power. Only an agreement freely reached by the leaders may be put to separate simultaneous referenda. Any kind of arbitration is excluded.

7. The sides will seek to create a positive atmosphere to ensure the talks succeed. They commit to avoiding blame games or other negative public comments on the negotiations. They also commit to efforts to implement confidence building measures that will provide dynamic impetus to the prospect for a united Cyprus.

The Name Issue Revisited: an examination of the Greek-Macedonian dispute

2014-02-05T00:19:00.001+00:00

The Name Issue Revisited, an Anthology of Academic Articles is finally now out.

Part I: The Name Issue in the Context of International Law
Matthew CR Craven – What’s in a Name? The Republic of Macedonia and Issues of Statehood............................................................................... 17
Jean-Pierre Queneudec – The Name and Symbols of the State in International Law....................................................................................55
Larry Reimer – Macedonia: Cultural Right or Cultural Appropriation?..................... 61
Carlos Flores Juberías – Putting the Name Issue in a Comparative Perspective ..........79
Jana Lozanoska – The True Substance of the Name Issue: Consequences of an Invented Dispute for the Republic of Macedonia...............................95
Budislav Vukas – The 1995 Interim Accord and Membership of the Republic of Macedonia in International Organizations............................. 113
Ernest Petrič – “Legal Validity” of the ICJ Advisory Opinions ................................ 119
Sašo Georgievski – Normative Power Role of the European Union in the Settlement of the Difference Over the Name? A Macedonian View..................................................................................129
Part II: The Name Issue in Political Context
Richard Caplan – The European Community’s Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia .......................................................................... 155
John Shea – The Greek Dispute With the New Republic of Macedonia – to 1995..............................................................169
Biljana Vankovska – David vs. Goliath: The Macedonian Position(s) in the So-Called “Name Dispute”.............................................................. 195
Spyros A. Sofos – Beyond the Intractability of the Greek-Macedonian Dispute ........223
Part III: Identity, Origin and Language—Deconstructing the Myths Surrounding the Name Issue
Victor A. Friedman – The So-Called Macedonian Name Issue in the Context of Modern Macedonian Historiography, Language, and Identity.............239
Loring M. Danforth – The Scholar and the State: Evangelos Kofos on the International Recognition of the Republic of Macedonia .........................253
George Vlahov, Vasko Nastevski and Chris Popov – A Survey of the ‘Macedonian
Question’: The Greek State’s Campaign to Prevent International Recognition of the Republic of Macedonia and Greece’s Refusal to Recognize the Macedonian Minority in Greece....................................267
Katerina Kolozova – Living Beyond Identity?...........................................................305
Akis Gavriilidis – Name Trouble: A Refusal “Especially Difficult to Understand”—and Its Inevitable Failure................................................... 313
Part IV: The Name Issue in Historical Context
Mitko B. Panov – Real and Created Perceptions of Macedonia and the Macedonians in Byzantine Sources from the 4th to the 11th Century: Reconstruction and Deconstruction .........................................................343
Dalibor Jovanovski – Science and Politics—The Creation and Promotion of the Northern Line of the Greek Aspirations in Ottoman Macedonia ............................................................................. 371
Andrew Rossos – Incompatible Allies: Greek Communism and Macedonian Nationalism in the Civil War in Greece, 1943-1949.................................389
Todor Cepreganov – The Great Powers and the Macedonian National Issue During World War II........................................................ 419
Todor Cepreganov and Liljana Panovska – The Civil War in Greece (1946-1949): One Event in History—One Lesson for the Future..................................435
Dimitar Ljorovski Vamvakovski – The Naming of Macedonians by the Greek State (1946-1949): Options and Dilemmas....................................443
Dimitris Lithoksou – ‘The Skopjan Enemy’................................................................ 455
Part V: Testimonials
Zhelyu Zhelev – Once Again on the Recognition of Macedonia and the Name Dispute.....................................................................................463

Robin O’Neill – Macedonia and the European Community: 1992............................ 479
Takis Michas – Plans for Macedonia.........................................................................497

Copies of the volume can be obtained from the the publishers: contact@micnews.com.mk or

Macedonian Information Centre
Naum Naumovski Borce 73,
1000 Skopje
Republic of Macedonia

Tel./Fax:
+389 2 3117 876
+389 2 3117 834
+389 2 3221 842

Post-yugoslav hell

2014-02-03T03:26:00.000+00:00

On 31 January the BBC News website focused on a fresco in the Church of the Resurrection in Podgorica that depicted hell. Within a vivid red inferno and in the company of biblical figures that have been condemned to burn in hell, one can see figures bearing a resemblance to an ageless Josip Broz Tito (or Michael Caine cast to impersonate him), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and, behind them barely discernible, Lenin and Stalin. The anonymous artist assumed that propagating and 'implementing' communism was a deadly sin but carefully steered away from any similar judgments as far as the opportunistic nationalism that traumatized the societies of former Yugoslavia are concerned. So no Milosevic, Bulatovic, Karadzic or Mladic are discernible in the political hell featured in the walls of the Church of the Resurrection, perhaps while the verdicts on their genocide indictments are pending ...

A church in Montenegro has sparked controversy by displaying a fresco depicting Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito in the fires of hell with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The newly built Church of Resurrection in the capital Podgorica has already drawn criticism for its lavish design.

Critics now say the church should not be interfering in politics.

Works by philosophers Marx and Engels were required reading when Montenegro was part of communist Yugoslavia.

One church leader, named only as Dragan, told the Agence France-Presse news agency that Marx, Engels and Tito "personify communist evil in the Balkans" and the artist should be "allowed the freedom to see things as he wishes".

However, he added: "He cannot judge, in the name of the Church, who belongs in hell or heaven."

You can read the entire BBC story here

The abrupt and violent end of ERT: some thoughts/Ο ξαφνικος και βιαιος θανατος της Ελληνικης Ραδιοφωνιας Τηλεορασης: μερικες σκεψεις

2013-11-08T00:54:00.000+00:00

An English language version of this text can be found below

Μερικες 'αβολες' και μαλλον καθυστερημενες σκεψεις με αφορμη τα γεγονοτα στο κτηριο της ΕΡΤ...
Τα αισθηματα μου για την ΕΡΤ ηταν παντα αναμικτα. Δεν μπορω ουτε καν να απαριθμησω τα ποιοτικα πενιχρα προγραμματα, τους υπαλληλους φαντασματα ή τουριστες, τις στιγμες που η ελλειψη ανεξαρτησιας απο την εκαστοτε κυβερνηση την εκανε ξεδιαντροπο εργαλειο δημοσιων σχεσεων πολιτικων παραταξεων, υπουργων και βουλευτων. Ομως μπορω να απαριθμησω (λιγες αλλα οχι ασημαντες) στιγμες (το παλιο Τριτο, το οτι η ΕΡΤ αποτελεσε το μεσο επαφης με το ποιοτικο θεατρο και μουσικη για ανθρωπους παγιδευμενους σε νησιδες πολιτιστικης, και συχνα υλικης, ενδειας, ιδιαιτερα στο τελος της δεκαετιας του 70 και στις αρχες του 80, την ορχηστρα της και λιγοστες αξιοσημειωτες παραγωγες που η ιδιωτικη ραδιοτηλεοραση θα θεωρουσε οικονομικα ασυμφορες). Ακομη και τοτε, οφειλω να ομολογησω πως θα δυσκολευομουν να κατανοησω πως εργαζομενοι που μεχρι προ τινος 'επαιζαν το παιχνιδι' και θωπευαν τις πολιτικες ηγεσιες υιοθετουν τις δραματικες στιγμες της εξωσης τους απο το ραδιομεγαρο λογο που παραπεμπει σε ιστορικες στιγμες οπως η τελευταια εκπομπη του Ραδιοφωνικου Σταθμου Αθηνων πριν την παραδοση της πολης στους ναζι, και ο ιστορικα φορτισμενος αποχαιρετισμος 'ψυχη βαθια' πριν το προγραμμα σιγησει.

Παρ’ολους αυτους τους ενδοιασμους, η ανιστορητη εισβολη των ΜΑΤ στην ΕΡΤ χωρις καμμια αμφιβολια αποτελεσε στιγμη ντροπης για μια πολιτεια που θελει να αυτοχαρακτηριζεται ως δημοκρατια και που προσπαθησε να ξεπερασει τετοια τραυματικα βιωματα του αυταρχικου της παρελθοντος. Βεβαια, η μεθοδευση της κυβερνησης, απο το ξαφνικο κλεισιμο της ΕΡΤ, στην παντελη ελειψη σχεδιασμου και κυριως δημοσιας συζητησης για τι ειδους δημοσια ραδιοτηλεοραση προσδοκα η κοινωνια προδιδει εναν γενικοτερο επικινδυνο αυταρχικο τυχοδιωκτισμο. Η καταληψη και το κλειδωμα με χειροπεδες ενος χωρου ταυτισμενου με εναν θεσμο ο οποιος αν και υπολειτουργησε συμβολιζε την σημασια της δημοσιας ραδιοτηλεορασης ως κοινωνικου αγαθου αποτελει μια θλιβερη και απαραδεκτη στιγμη και προδιδει ελλειψη συναισθησης του ατοπηματος μιας κυβερνησης που εχει εθιστει στο να κανει σπασμωδικες κινησεις στα ορια της νομιμοτητας και ερημην των πολιτων.
Το μηνυμα της σημερινης ημερας ειναι ιδιαιτερα καταθλιπτικο. Η πολωση μεταξυ των υποστηρικτων της κυβερνητικης αποφασης για την επεμβαση των αστυνομικων δυναμεων στο κτηριο της ΕΡΤ και των υποστηρικτων της αναπαραστασης του αγωνα των εργαζομενων στην ΕΡΤ ως εθνικη αντισταση και συνεχεια του εμφυλιου, καταδεικνυει την ολισθηση της κοινωνιας σε λυσεις ωμης καταστολης απο την μια πλευρα και εξωθεσμικες μορφες αντιπολιτευσης απο την αλλη και αποκαλυπτει την διαβρωση του πολιτικου συστηματος – την ανυπαρξια χωρων δημοκρατικης συνυπαρξης, συννενοησης και διαπραγματευσης. Στην κυβερνητικη ταση να αντιμετωπιζει τα προβληματα με συμβολικη και υλικη βια αντιτασσεται ενας λογος που παραπεμπει σε εμφυλιες διενεξεις, σε λογικες του ή ολα ή τιποτε.

As Greek riot police cleared the headquarters of the former state broadcaster ERT, using tear gas to gain entry and arresting several people I thought of collecting here some uncomfortable and overdue thoughts ...

I have always had mixed feelings about ERT (Greek Radio Television). Low quality output, absentee employees, the organization's dependence on the government of the day which often degenerated to subservience to political parties and personalities are some of the reasons behind my misgivings. On the other hand, ERT was the only institution that had the resources and the largely unfulfilled potential of going against the grain of the logic of the commercialization and tabloidization of Greece's mediascape. Over its career, there have been positive moments of quality programming that none of its private sector competitors were prepared to produce and one should not forget that back in the 1970s and 80s, ERT provided a window to theatre, music and the arts to people who were marginalized and had no alternative means of accessing these.

Having said that, as the police was entering the public broadcaster headquarters, I must admit that I found it difficult to understand how the journalists and technicians who were still continuing broadcasts despite the summary decision of the government to close down ERT back in June, who in the past were complacent or at least silent about the subservience of the public broadcaster to the government, switched so easily to the role of protectors of the public interest and of free radio and television. What I found striking was their adoption during the dramatic moments of their eviction from the studios of ERT of a discourse referring to historical moments laden with painful memories such as the last broadcast of the Athens Radio Station before it was taken over by the occupying German forces in April 1941 warning listeners that future broadcasts will be serving the occupiers.

This notwithstanding, the sight of armed police forces storming the premises of the public broadcaster betrayed a brazen disregard for media freedom and a lack of historical sensitivity and awareness. It constituted a shameful moment for a polity that claims to be a democracy and that was supposed to put such moments behind it. Of course, the government had signaled its cynicism and disregard for 'inconvenient details' such as respect for proper procedure and dialogue back in June when, without warning and definitely without a trace of public consultation it moved to close down the public service broadcaster. The police occupation of a space symbolizing public radio-television, despite the imperfections and shortcomings of ERT, the securing of the gates with a pair of standard issue police handcuffs constitutes a sad and unacceptable moment and betrays a government that is out of touch and has been used to move at the threshold of legality and in disregard of the public feeling.

Overall, the message of the day is depressing and alarming. The polarization between those who support the government decision to order the police to storm the ERT building and those who support the message that this is a struggle against an occupying force demonstrates the emerging appetite for solutions relying in the exercise of crude force (police violence, summary decision making processes) on the one hand and reveals the erosion of the political system - the lack of spaces of democratic coexistence, negotiation and mutual understanding and the increasing popularity of extrainstitutional forms of opposition.

To the tendency of the government to resort to symbolic or material violence in order to deal with its problems one can see the juxtaposition of a discourse that refers to the resistance to occupation and to the bitter divisions of the civil war.

Stories from 'the time of the monsters'

2013-10-16T00:00:00.000+01:00

This is a true story ... A story that sometime ago I would have thought was part of some sort of dystopian fiction. As time passes, I cannot shake away the feeling that it increasingly looks and feels like a nightmare that returns night after night with more intensity and power and from which one finds it more and more difficult to wake up.

It happened at Ayios Ilias, part of a long stretch of sand dunes on the west coast of the Peloponnese, just over eight weeks ago, on what would have otherwise simply been just another hot sunny summer day. The beach - a popular destination for groups of young people and families seeking a quiet place by the sea to spend their summer days, was fairly crowded. Built at the point where the sand dunes met the road, the local tavern was also crowded with companies having a late lunch after a day at the beach. In the midst of the terrace, one could see a group of six men in their thirties, all dressed in black. I did not pay much attention at what, admittedly and with hindsight, constituted an obvious paraphony, something like a black ink blot staining the colourful canvas made up by the clothes, towels and bags of the other customers.

Suddenly, a woman in her mid-forties, apparently in shock, rushed out of the tavern, through the terrace and clumsily run the twenty meters of sand that separated her from the sea, looking right and left, calling for help. As she drew closer I could hear that she was asking people to save 'the girl' in the tavern.

Not thinking that much, I run into the tavern to join a dozen of other people outside and inside the kitchen where four of the black-clad men were being held back by one of their friends. To my right, a distraught young woman was crying and her hands - in fact her whole body - was trembling. The owner, an elderly woman, upset but also barely able to disguise her fear, had gripped the woman's arms and was shaking her violently, shouting at her to leave her restaurant. The younger woman, clearly upset and disoriented was almost catatonic, unable to respond or establish eye contact. Having scanned the room, I slowly turned my head towards the men and confirmed what my earlier glance had registered. They were wearing a sort of uniform, with black tee-shirts with the Golden Dawn logo on their back and the Greek flag on one of their sleeves - I cannot remember which one- complete with combat fatigue bottoms and army-type boots. They were hurling insults at the shocked girl while one of them, barely kept in check by one of his comrades, was threatening he was going to do unspeakable things to her. I had recently read that 'units' of Golden Dawn men had been formed to 'patrol' the beaches and tourist hotspots making sure that the places were kept 'clean' of undesirable (mainly west African and Pakistani) street vendors, often to the delight of local shop-keepers, and I was in no doubt that these men were tasked to intimidate, terrorize and hurt. As I was told later, the young woman could not bear the presence of the uniformed gang and, ignoring the advice of her friends who chose to remain silent, decided to approach them and ask them to leave. Apparently, the six men challenged the young woman, and she told them that their presence next to families with young children was unacceptable and accused their theories of racial purity as racist and dangerous. The men started threatening her and and one chased her into the restaurant. The woman entered the kitchen and run to the owner telling her that the men's presence was unacceptable and asking her to tell them to leave.

I, impulsively, together with three, maybe four others positioned ourselves between the girl and the gang. When we asked the gang to leave, they arrogantly retorted they were 'ordinary' customers and insisted that they expected to be treated as such. I probably hesitated, thinking through the repercussions of challenging them, but before I finished weighing the pros and the cons of intervening, I heard myself say to them that their 'uniform' suggested otherwise. It carried with it the message of an organization that was spreading hatred and fear. They did not respond as they were fixated on the young woman that, alone, had dared to confront them, to pass on the message that what they represented was not unopposed. A bystander who had until then claimed to be the voice of moderation, trying to soothe the angry men saying that what the young woman had said to them was not 'a big deal', certainly not a reason to get that upset, turned to me and said he found my comments unacceptable and provocative. He reproachfully told me that I exaggerated. He suggested that I read too much into the way these people dressed – after all they had the right to dress as they saw fit. Shocked by what I was hearing, I retorted that their 'uniforms' were conveying a message of hatred against foreigners and dissenters, that they terrorized people and constituted a means of gaining authority, in fact usurping it. He was unimpressed as were many more bystanders.

In the meantime, some people took the young woman to the side of the restaurant and were trying to convince her that this was not the way to deal with the Golden Dawn. The restaurant owner, clearly shaken, went to great lengths to appease the Golden Dawn men, then turned to the young woman and started shouting at her that she had no right to demand the removal of the men. Another woman mustered all her courage and managed to whisper that there was nothing wrong with the reaction of the young woman and that the presence of the six men offended the customers. No one paid attention. As the situation deescalated, the men and the woman left the restaurant and so did I along with the many people who had congregated there. Eventually, the six men returned and sat briefly at the terrace table they had previously occupied, only to leave a few minutes later walking over a bed of flowers and plants.

With the protagonists of this episode gone, there was little left to remind the encounter of the young woman and the Golden Dawn 'militia'. The sun was shining, the sea was inviting as usual, people returned to the beach or back to their tables at the tavern and did their best to forget what had happened. I, too, welcomed the relative calm, the soothing sound of the waves washing the shore. But I could not ignore what had just happened. I got an opportunity to recall, possibly fully realize, the barely suppressed apprehension, not that different from fear really, that I felt when I run into the tavern, the young girl's courage to do what no one else was prepared to do and face alone the monster. In snapshot-like flashbacks I saw the sheer undiluted hatred in the expression of the six men, but also the apathy in the faces of many bystanders who seemed unable or unwilling to understand why their day at the beach had to be spoiled by the whim of a girl. I also recognized the fear in the eyes of the restaurant owner, a fear that dictated looking the other way and, when necessary, appeasing the monster in our midst, even taking its side. I realized that this potent mixture of hatred, apathy and fear was in fact everywhere around me.

At the beach where most people had already 'forgotten' what had transpired, in the villages, and the cities where Golden Dawn has managed to become a feature of daily life because of the misplaced zeal of its blackshirt minions enjoying the illusion of power and, yes, even respectability, because of its apologists who are happy to justify the poison it spreads as they secretly share its murky vision, because of those who are prepared to turn a blind eye to avoid any discomfort standing up to the monster they are nurturing entails. As day after day violence becomes entrenched in society, as the basic rights of migrants, minorities, critics, of anyone who is deemed to be different are routinely ignored and violated, as human life becomes more and more expendable, the future seems gloomy. And like in those horror films where you think the monster has been defeated until, in the final frame its shadowy figure can be seen lurking in the background - a reminder that evil has not been defeated and awaits another chance, even if the evil organization is dissolved or fades away, the monster will still be lurking in the most dimly lit corners of a society that has got so accustomed looking into its eyes and eventually got to recognize itself in them.

Turkey after Gezi - Call for Justice and Respect

2013-07-10T13:51:00.003+01:00

Academics, journalists, activists and public intellectuals issue a call for justice and respect. The initiative stresses the need for mutual understanding and dialogue as a way out of the political polarization that threatens the very fabric of Turkish society in the wake of Gezi protests. Unlike its predecessors, the inititative reaches out to various segments of the society, from pious intellectuals to democratic left, the LGBT to Kurds and Alevis, and attemtps to propose a brief list of democratic measures that can be adopted quickly, to alleviate the ongoing tensions and make space for the discussion of more fundmental problems, notably the Kurdish peace process.

The call will be made public in a meeting that will take place on Thursday 11 July 2013 at 11.00, in Aynali Gecit (see below for details).

You are all welcome!

Address: Meşrutiyet Cad. Avrupa Pasajı No:8 K.2 Galatasaray / Beyoğlu/Istanbul

Emine Tarhan
Email: emitarhan@gmail.com

Taksim Revisited

2013-06-19T23:42:00.000+01:00

This is a second effort to comment on the recent protest in Turkey. This 'second take' is informed by having had the opportunity to talk over the past couple of days to a number of people in Istanbul with diverse opinions on the situation .

In an article I wrote back in 2007 on the events of the summer of that year in Turkey, I had tried to develop a reasoning that countered the way in which the military-bureaucratic establishment in Turkey framed Islamism in general, and the AKP in particular, as the ‘Other’, as an outsider to the Turkish body politic that threatened to destroy the achievements of the secular, modernizing forces that had built the Republic. I was arguing then

it is evident that, contrary to the attempted simplification of the current political situation into one characterized by the irreconcilable conflict between a monolithic and fundamentalist Islamist camp bent on introducing Şeriat (sharia law) and Turkey’s secular forces, the reality is much more complex. Political Islam in contemporary Turkey is an incredibly diverse phenomenon that cannot be reduced to the traditional label of religious fundamentalism. In this vein, the AKP should be seen as a multifaceted, internally diverse movement that comprises old Islamist political forces, to be sure, but increasingly, the new middle class and business elite that emerged in the 1980s due to the transformation of the official Kemalist discourse into one that had room for Islam and, indeed, depended on the latter for its own legitimacy and effectiveness. As such, it purports to represent both the urban and provincial poor who see in Islam the promise of social justice and of what Tuğal (2002: 101) has called ‘moral anticapitalism’ and the aspiring economic elites who consider that the party’s Islamic discourse has room for what Tuğal once more calls alternative, or ‘moral capitalism’. As it has also been pointed out, (Cornell 1999; Sofos 2001: 259) Islamic political forces have been very successful in attracting the young, especially those disaffected with the impasses of Turkey’s tutelary democracy, corruption and Turkey’s state bureaucracy. It is this, additional, dimension of political Islam in Turkey, its ability to attract considerable numbers of young and disgruntled voters and to articulate their disenchantment, that has been largely ignored by commentators and politicians alike.

Within a few years, the AKP, and Prime Minister Erdoǧan in particular, had presided over a sea change in Turkish politics. The military had been tamed and slowly abandoned its intervention reflexes, a fossilized opposition had started to consider embarking on a long and painful process of renewal, and secularism was being redefined in ways that did not discriminate against citizens who faced the dilemma of compromising their religious beliefs in order to participate in the public arena (I am primarily, though not exclusively, thinking of the relaxation of the restrictions imposed on covered women entering in education or employment in certain areas of the public sector). A lot of its achievements have been controversial. The investigation of senior army officers for corruption and conspiracy has attracted accusations of fixed charges and has been likened to a witch-hunt. The number of journalists that faced government obstructionism and lack of transparency or even were incarcerated has increased dramatically. The AKP and its leader have grown arrogant and have started marginalizing their secular, liberal and leftist critics in ways that are reminiscent of the marginalization of their constituency by the 'Kemalist' establishment.

The events that started at the Gezi Park in late May have been interpreted in substantially different ways by the different parties involved. The protesters - not a homogeneous group - have, at least temporarily, been brought together through what social movement researchers call 'the construction of shared injustice frames'. In simpler words, they perceive themselves increasingly ignored and marginalized by an arrogant government and Prime Minister. Some of the people I talked to describe the protest as a 'White Turk Revolution'. If this means the political coming of age of relatively young and hitherto relatively apolitical Turks, the label 'White Turk' is accurate. If this means that the events have set in motion of a long, arduous process of political realignment of the political system, then the term 'revolution' is also accurate. Some of the protesters I talked to are passionate secularists and some are nostalgic of the 'Kemalist era' meaning the time prior to the political ascendance of the AKP, although they have little or no memory or experience of it.

Others have been more irreverent towards the Kemalist heritage - protesters in Taksim put fruit in the hands of the statue of Mustafa Kemal on the İstiklal Anıtı (Independence Monument) whereas others covered the facade of the Ataturk cultural center with banners and flags. And, next to the secular or liberal or leftist youth one needs to recognize the Alevis who have been increasingly worried about an increasingly assertive AKP and all sorts of different political minorities with other particular concerns.

On the other hand, the very few AKP supporters I managed to talk to gave me an insight to the fear of becoming marginalized again under an aggressive secularist system that would draw legitimacy from the secular educated middle and upper classes. Some argued that the 'Kemalists' ' contempt towards 'them' could be described as racism. Which reminded me, incidentally, a discussion I had a few years ago with a major Leftist intellectual whose name I would not divulge who had said, referring to the AKP's Anatolian strongholds, 'Anatolia is a factory of ignorant fascists'. Against this background, the arrogance of some in the leadership of the AKP notwithstanding, one can understand (not though justify) the fierce and brutal reaction of the government.

The paradox of this situation is that the protesting youth in the street are the product of a period of economic development and increased educational and employment opportunities created by the model of development adopted by the AKP. Although its paternity may be unclear as it built on the economic plans of Kemal Derviş, their paternity is complex and points partly to the AKP. As I suggested in another note, the protests constitute an alarm call for both government and opposition. They should bring home to the AKP the realization that Turkish democracy, all its deficiencies notwithstanding, has come of age. The streaks of majoritarian authoritarianism inherent in the AKP governmental record are increasingly becoming unpalatable to half of the electorate that had remained sceptical of the AKP’s pre-election assurances that it was not intending to pursue a strategy of creeping islamization. Arrogance and contempt can generate powerful emotions and solidarities and the past few days have made this abundantly clear. The opposition’s irrelevance during the protests is bearing bad news for its leadership. Although some of the slogans used during the protests such as the popular ‘we are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal’, at first sight reflect the endurance of the Kemalist ideology shared by CHP, the major opposition party, along with many other smaller political forces, the secular, democratic and grassroots outlook of the protests has very little to do with the fossilized, elitist and statist version of Kemalism revered by opposition parties.

If one had to resort to catchwords to describe Turkish society today, the words that come to mind are post-Kemalist and post-Islamist. To be more accurate albeit still simplistic, it is a society where secular modernity (including its political-democratic components traditional Kemalism has been so ill-at-ease with) intersects and interacts with conservative, often religious values, expressed by particular factions within the AKP, in so many possible ways. The messages conveyed by the popularity of the AKP and the vibrancy of the ongoing protests are unambiguous: the contradictions of Turkish society call, not for political and social polarization, but for the search of a modus vivendi, one that needs to be painstakingly invented and continually recalibrated, based on democracy, tolerance and compromise. It means that the fears of the protesters and those of the supporters of the AKP need to be addressed. And this will require a government and an opposition that are prepared to ‘listen’. I still maintain that whether the political class of the country is prepared to embrace the challenge of renewal is yet to be seen.

mixed messages from the balkans

2013-06-11T15:27:00.000+01:00

The protests that spread from the relatively small and rather underused Gezi park in Istanbul to a host of cities and towns throughout Turkey are not likely to overthrow the AKP government. As I was pointing out in another note, the demonstrations had a dual effect. On the one hand they were an indictment of the the arrogance and contempt for dissenting opinion displayed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and an expression of increasing unease at the way the party has been introducing issues of public morality in the political agenda as new alcohol regulations and the Ankara Metro protests indicate. And, it is becoming increasingly clear that they constituted a condemnation of the alliance of the AKP with particular corporate elites that seem to benefit from the capitalist development model the party has promoted. On the other hand, they inadvertently exposed the irrelevance and lack of vision of the opposition parties.

The protests are likely to fizzle out, the AKP will probably stay on to complete its full term in office but the events will have left an indelible mark on the Turkish political system; different factions (and personalities) within the AKP but also within the 'secular' opposition will be reflecting on this outburst of social protest and the reaction of Turkey's political class to it.

At the very same time Turkey was experiencing the shockwaves of grassroots politics, Bosnia-Herzegovina was witnessing the emergence of a protest movement that was largely overshadowed by the magnitude of the protest in Turkey. Sparked by the case of baby Belmina Ibrisevic, whose life was endangered as obstructionist tactics in the parliament meant that legislation necessary for the production of the documents that would allow her to travel abroad for treatment was not forthcoming Bosnia's Baby Revolution stirred the stagnant waters of the country's byzantine politics. Within days several thousand protesters were outside the parliament demanding that their representatives abandoned grandstanding and passed this and other legislation that would start addressing some of the pressing needs of the citizens. Just as in Turkey, a 'localized' issue became the rallying point for a broader protest movement which, notably, has transcended ethnic lines. The Sarajevo protests were followed by protests in the towns of Prijedor, Banja Luka, Mostar and Zenica conveying the message that ethnic politics and divides can be overcome by a sense of common citizenship forged in the process of the pursuit of solutions to common problems and challenges and, ultimately, of a better future.

The mood in nearby Macedonia, on the other hand, is not upbeat. The governing VMRO-DMPNE is preparing for the grand finale of its Skopje 2014 transformation of the country's capital. I have commented elsewhere on the controversial character of the project, so I will just point out that the project does not possess only an aesthetic component as the government often suggests but constitutes an intervention in the social imaginary of the country as it constitutes a veritable exercise in grafting a particular kind of memory, of history, in the physical space upon which social imaginaries are built. In a way reminiscent of Turkey, after over a decade in office, VMRO-DMPNE has grown arrogant and has sought to discredit and criminalize dissent and opposition at every opportunity. Recent examples include the new law on abortion, welcomed by the Orthodox Church and placating ultra-nationalist factions within the party, concerned at the demographic decline of the Macedonian nation which was passed by the narrowest of majorities, and the storming of a Skopje City Hall municipality by supporters of the government-approved plan to build an imposing Church in Skopje's Centar after rumours that the city's new, opposition, Mayor, Andrej Zernovski was planning to demolish it. The polarization of Macedonian politics was echoed in the slogans used by the mob who called the mayor's supporters “Communist Scum!” and “Muslims!”.

But here the analogy with Turkey's political turmoil ends. Despite the inventiveness of grassroots movements in Macedonia, the prevailing mood is one of resignation. There is no sign of a robust response to the massive and ambitious intervention of the government ideologues in everyday life and the erosion of spaces where dissent and difference can be articulated.

Taksim: a protest like no other

2013-06-03T15:15:00.000+01:00

Taksim Meydanı has been a focal point of political protest in Turkey for the best part of the last one hundred years. It has also seen its fair share of violence and destruction: the Kanlı Pazar (Bloody Sunday) of February 1969, the Kanlı 1 Mayıs (First of May massacre) of 1977 are the most well known such examples. Traditionally the location of choice for the celebration of the 1st of May for the Left, it was off limits this year as the May Day events were not allowed to take place there. As a result, small scale skirmishes between Left-wing activists and the police took place in the surrounding streets a month ago but the area was soon back to normality.
So, earlier last month, no one would have imagined that Taksim would once more become the arena of the violent events of the past few days. The few protesters that started gathering and organized a sit-in at the site of Gezi Park in the run-up to 26 May to protest against the destruction of Gezi Park and the rebuilding on its site of the Ottoman Halil Paşa Artillery Barracks as a museum-cum-shopping centre had probably not imagined that they were going to become yet another addition to Taxim’s turbulent history of protest. Even more so, little did they imagine that their action was to become the springboard for a broader and viral protest movement throughout the country. Yet, in the early morning of 30 May the police attacked them displaying unprecedented brutality, using chemicals and water cannons - to the extent that one can safely deduce they acted with explicit and unambiguous government approval.

The initial protest was described by many as an effort to save the park that stands at the centre of the proposed development. Indeed, this is not an implausible explanation as Gezi park is probably the only notable green area in the vicinity, and one that should have been protected had not the developers expertly used regulations for the protection of historical and cultural heritage (read the museum to be housed in the rebuilt Halil Paşa Barracks) to overcome the statutory development restrictions in a green space. Indeed, many protestors are concerned at a host of major infrastructure projects that are going ahead without effective consultation such as a third airport, a new mosque that will dominate the Istanbul skyline, the opening of a ship canal in the Marmara area. Leaving aside the environmental concerns and the increasing public expressions of reservations of the pervasiveness of the market logic in the AKP leadership vision of a modern Turkey which I intend to discuss in a separate note, the governing party has managed to alienate several relatively young and upwardly mobile parts of its electorate who had invested, not in its Islamic credentials, but in its democratic promise against the tutelary democracy promised by its political adversaries. Indeed, eleven years after the AKP’s first landslide victory at the polls and its uninterrupted and virtually unchallenged hold to power, the political atmosphere was quite charged as the government had paid lip service to the accountability it had promised to uphold in the last elections and has introduced controversial measures such as the new regulations restricting alcohol sales near schools and mosques which, to many secularists, augured what many called ‘islamization by stealth’.

Within this atmosphere of suspicion and doubt, Gezi park almost instantaneously became the focal point of a massive and intricately networked popular movement. On the ground, people converged to the park to express a diffuse sense of unease and dissatisfaction, although, at least initially, no one could give it a clear shape or content. Despite the reluctance of television channels to relay news from Gezi park, news traveled fast to other cities and towns across Turkey, largely, though not exclusively, through the help of social media. Local protests were organized in various other urban centres and information and expressions of solidarity flowed through cyberspace between the various localities hosting their own protest events. As the police had not anticipated this transformation of an originally small and fairly localized protest into something so large and unprecedented in Turkish politics, it reacted with more violence. Local and national politicians were also unprepared for such an event and ill-equipped to make sense of it and articulate an appropriate reaction. Prime Minister Erdoǧan, described the protesters as ayyaş (alcoholics) and capulcu – slang for thug, punk or troublemaker. His reaction was arrogant and threatening as he warned them that he had his own supporters and he should not be provoked. His response was not untypical of his style of government which has attracted criticism for frequently shunning criticisms and reservations expressed by opponents . It reflected his puzzlement at how he, who had presided over a long period of economic prosperity and regional hegemony was at the receiving end of the ire of a nationwide protest movement that had just added in its demands his resignation. Erdoǧan, an otherwise astute politician who had changed the face of the country in his ten years in office by taming the country’s military that had seen fit on several occasions to brutally suspend party democracy on the grounds of the need to protect the country’s Kemalist heritage, by modernizing the country’s Civil Law and by bringing Turkey at the threshold of a historic peaceful settlement of the country’s Kurdish question, was unable to comprehend his sudden transformation into a villain. Other members of his party with less abrasive manners tried, once they became aware of the dimensions of the protest movement, to adopt more conciliatory positions: Abdullah Gül, President of the Republic conceded that freedom of expression and protest is part and parcel of democracy and assured the demonstrators that he had taken on board the message of the protest while Bülent Arınç, Deputy Prime Minister, offered to review the Taksim project in consultation with all parties and suggested that violence was not the appropriate response to the protests. The opposition parties and their leadership were also unable to make sense of what should have normally been a gift for any political force aspiring to end the AKP’s hegemony over Turkish politics. The so-called ‘secularist’ political forces have not had a notable role in the events of the recent days and the fact that their traditional supporters are almost certainly over-represented in the ongoing protest movement should not be interpreted as a sign of the return of the opposition from the wilderness. The current protest is not a party-led movement as the 2007 anti-AKP demonstrations which the opposition had organized in 2007 - its much more protean structure and discourses and its grassroots character indicate that the opposition parties may no longer provide a vehicle for alternative voices and the expression of political disagreement and dissent.

The protests constitute an alarm call for both government and opposition. They should bring home to the AKP the realization that Turkish democracy, all its deficiencies notwithstanding, has come of age. The streaks of majoritarian authoritarianism inherent in the AKP governmental record are increasingly becoming unpalatable to half of the electorate that had remained sceptical of the AKP’s pre-election assurances that it was not intending to pursue a strategy of creeping islamization. Arrogance and contempt can generate powerful emotions and solidarities and the past few days have made this abundantly clear. The opposition’s irrelevance during the protests is bearing bad news for its leadership. Although some of the slogans used during the protests such as the popular ‘we are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal’, at first sight reflect the endurance of the Kemalist ideology shared by CHP, the major opposition party, with many other smaller political forces, the secular, democratic and grassroots outlook of the protests have very little to do with the fossilized, elitist and statist version of Kemalism revered by opposition parties. If one could use catchwords to describe Turkish society today, the words that come to mind are post-Kemalist and post-Islamist. To be more accurate albeit still simplistic, it is a society where secular modernity (including its political-democratic components traditional Kemalism has been so ill-at-ease with) intersects and interacts with conservative, often religious values, expressed by particular factionjs within the AKP, in so many possible ways. The messages conveyed by the popularity of the AKP and the vibrancy of the ongoing protests are unambiguous: the contradictions of Turkish society call, not for political and social polarization, but for the search of a modus vivendi, one that needs to be painstakingly invented and continually recalibrated, based on democracy, tolerance and compromise. This will require a government and an opposition that are prepared to ‘listen’. Whether the political class of the country is prepared to embrace the challenge of renewal is yet to be seen.

IN SEARCH OF A MODEL FOR THE MIDDLE EAST: RETHINKING THE TURKISH AND NORDIC EXPERIENCES

2013-04-26T12:15:00.000+01:00

English translation of an article originally published in http://www.sydsvenskan.se/opinion/aktuella-fragor/tala-om-modeller/

IN SEARCH OF A MODEL FOR THE MIDDLE EAST: RETHINKING THE TURKISH AND NORDIC EXPERIENCES

På Spaning Efter En Modell För Mellanöstern: … Av Turkiska Och Nordiska Erfarenheter

Umut Ozkirimli är professor i samtida Turkietstudier och verksam vid Centrum för Mellanösternstudier vid Lunds universitet.

Spyros A. Sofos är gästforskare vid Centrum för Mellanösternstudier vid Lunds universitet.

The “Arab Spring” caught everybody off guard. Almost overnight, autocratic regimes have been toppled, social and ideological fissures have emerged, and conflict has become the order of the day, sometimes crashing hopes for freedom, democracy and dignity. But political change is like the Swedish winter, long and replete with challenges. Transition to democracy requires a national consensus and a new social contract based on respect for human rights, recognition of difference and reduction of socioeconomic inequalities. Given these challenges, it is not surprising that many in the region and the West have looked upon models to emulate, ready-made frameworks to be adopted without much consideration of the historical and cultural specifities of the Middle East.

Two countries that have often been mentioned in this kind of model talk are Turkey and Sweden. Turkey has been widely seen as an attractive model for the Middle East with its booming economy, its success in finding a balance between secularism and Islam and its vibrant civil society. Sweden, on the other hand, or more broadly the “Nordic” region has been recently hailed as the “next supermodel” by The Economist, an example to be followed not only by the transitional societies of the Middle East, but also by the ailing European Union. Yet how can we present Turkey and Sweden, two countries with markedly distinct nation- and state-building experiences, as models to the Middle East and beyond? Isn’t this like comparing apples and pears, simply because they are both fruits?

We believe not. First, the way the two countries have historically responded to modernity are quite similar. Both Kemalist Republicanism and the Swedish Social Democracy are perfect instances of “social engineering”, designed to create a particular kind of (modern) citizen. Second, in both countries the state plays an important role in shaping and regulating society, leading to what Lars Trägårdh and Henrik Berggren have called “state paternalism”. Third, and following from the first two, they experience similar difficulties in state-society and state-individual relations. Hence one can see the cohabitation in Turkey of democracy and a certain form of “majoritarian authoritarianism” where the rights of minorities are overlooked and in Sweden of notions of individual autonomy and a political culture which is characterized by deference to the state.

These similarities should not blind us to the differences between the two countries and the divergent outcomes of their processes of modernization. Moreover, there are serious problems with the uncritical and patronizing use of the notion of the “model”, and the way the “model” talk simplifies the complexity of social experience and the various inadequacies behind “perceived” success stories. In fact, both the attractiveness as well as the weakness of the notion of “model” lies in its ambiguous character that makes its articulation possible in a number of different discourses and agendas. This multiplicity of meanings constitutes a real challenge that needs to be taken into account in the discussion of models and their applicability.

Still, the situation in the Middle East is critical. There is urgent need to develop culturally appropriate pathways to sustainable transition that will not replicate earlier mistakes (Iraq, Afghanistan), that will respect democracy, pluralism and human rights without sacrificing social cohesion and national unity. We believe that it is important to unpack the historical trajectories of Turkey and Sweden in a systematic way and examine whether there is any experience that can constitute the subject of a constructive dialogue between these two “models” and the Middle East. This dialogue, we argue, should be one which is based on “mutual learning”, not on top-down policy planning or elitist attitudes which frame the Turkish and Swedish experiences as “better” or “superior” to Middle Eastern polities and cultures. We thus need to look more closely into the “model societies”, distinguish between good and bad practice, achievements and mistakes, and problematize the terms democracy and democratization. We need to focus not so much on what experience can be transferred, but on the processes of exchange and interaction between actors and institutions in the so-called models and the Middle Eastern societies. Only this could foster democratic transitions on a local, grass-roots level and strengthen a strong, pluralist civil society. After as Ingmar Bergman once put, “only he who is well prepared has any opportunity to improvise”.

Kosova/Serbia: Agreement of Principles Governing the Normalization of Relations

2013-04-19T23:55:00.002+01:00

The First Agreement of Principles Governing the Normalization of Relations between Kosova and Serbia was signed today. The text is deliberately vague so that it can satisfy both those who want to see the sovereignty of Prishtina over the North recognized and those who want to see some sort of recognition of the predominantly Serb municipalities of North Kosovo, nevertheless, it constitutes a breakthrough in the turbulent relationship between Serbia and its former province.

The agreement opens the way for the start of EU accession talks of the two countries - it is expected that Serbia will be invited to start accession negotiations as early as next week.

According to Kosovo's Gazeta Express the basic points of the agreement are:

1. There will be an Association/Community of Serb majority municipalities in Kosovo. Membership will be open to any other municipality provided the members are in agreement.

2. The Community/Association will be created by statute. Its dissolution shall only take place by a decision of the participating municipalities. Legal guarantees will be provided by applicable law and constitutional law (including the 2/3 majority rule).

3. The structures of the Association/Community will be established on the same basis as the existing statute of the Association of Kosovo municipalities e.g. President, vice President, Assembly, Council.

4. In accordance with the competences given by the European Charter of Local Self Government and Kosovo law the participating municipalities shall be entitled to cooperate in exercising their powers through the Community/Association collectively. The Association/Community will have full overview of the areas of economic development, education, health, urban and rural planning.

5. The Association/Community will exercise other additional competences as may be delegated by the central authorities.

6. The Community/Association shall have a representative role to the central authorities and will have a seat in the communities’ consultative council for this purpose. In the pursuit of this role a monitoring function is envisaged.

7. There shall be one police force in Kosovo called the Kosovo Police. All police in northern Kosovo shall be integrated in the Kosovo Police framework. Salaries will be only from the KP.

8. Members of other Serbian security structures will be offered a place in equivalent Kosovo structures.

9. There shall be a Police Regional Commander for the four northern Serb majority municipalities (Northern Mitrovica, Zvecan, Zubin Potok and Leposavic). The Commander of this region shall be a Kosovo Serb nominated by the Ministry of Interior from a list provided by the four mayors on behalf of the Community/Association. The composition of the KP in the north will reflect the ethnic composition of the population of the four municipalities. (There will be another Regional Commander for the municipalities of Mitrovica South, Skenderaj and Vushtrri). The regional commander of the four northern municipalities will cooperate with other regional commanders.

10. The judicial authorities will be integrated and operate within the Kosovo legal framework. The Appellate Court in Pristina will establish a panel composed of a majority of K/S judges to deal with all Kosovo Serb majority municipalities.

11. A division of this Appellate Court, composed both by administrative staff and judges will sit permanently in northern Mitrovica (Mitrovica District Court). Each panel of the above division will be composed by a majority of K/S judges. Appropriate judges will sit dependant on the nature of the case involved.

12. Municipal elections shall be organized in the northern municipalities in 2013 with the facilitation of the OSCE in accordance with Kosovo law and international standards.

13. Discussions on Energy and Telecoms will be intensified by the two sides and completed by June 15.

14. It is agreed that neither side will block, or encourage others to block, the other side’s progress in their respective EU path.

15. An implementation committee will be established by the two sides, with the facilitation of the EU

The Greek affliction

2013-04-19T21:00:00.003+01:00

Serbia and Kosovo have concluded their own version of an interim agreement today. Although the fate of the Greek-Macedonian Interim agreement suggests we should be cautious in our assessment of what has been achieved today, this EU-brokered rapprochement, despite its provisional character and vagueness, represents a very positive step, albeit short of full recognition.

Not for Greece though, as its ambitious agenda 2014 of a forward looking Greece in a forward looking Southeastern Europe is a faint mirage of what could have been. Instead, Greece is probably the only country that continues to follow the previous Serbian policy of non recognition of Kosovo. It is probably a symptom of a chronic affliction, of dwelling in a past forever gone. It reminds me of the Greek Communist Party's inability to realize it inhabits a world that has left Stalin's Soviet Union behind at a time that those who lived through it have long moved on.

Cyprus: one more chance?

2013-02-19T18:20:00.001+00:00

The political system of the Republic of Cyprus, even after the de facto partition of the island after the invasion of the Turkish armed forces back in the summer of 1974 is a system built on deliberation and compromise. Presidential elections are an intricate affair that can often lead to unlikely bedfellows sharing between them the key political positions of the small state and the power these entail. The likelihood of gaining positions of influence in the state apparatuses, as well as personal rivalries are usually important factors in determining the composition and shape of alliances, especially in the second round of the presidential poll. These are often shortsighted attempts to gain advantages that maintain and reproduce a clientelistic system and perpetuate the "relevance" of political parties that would have otherwise become obsolete. In such a context, the notions of Left, Centre and Right are not able to convey recognizable messages to the unsuspecting observer that has not got a grounding in the politics of the island.

It is no wonder therefore that we have rarely witnessed in Cypriot politics programmatic agreements that are inspired a vision of the future, that look forward beyond managing the present, to meeting the challenges that Cypriot society is facing in terms of building a healthy economy, deepening democracy and finding a viable and equitable solution to the Cyprus issue. With the possible exception of the 1998 presidential election, when Glafcos Clerides and George Vasiliou decided to put aside their differences and work together towards the dual goal of achieving a solution to the Cyprus issue and securing the Republic's accession to the EU, most presidential elections focused on much more short-term goals.
The glimmer of hope for a solution of the Cyprus issue that followed the succession of nationalist TassosPapadopoulos by AKEL's Dimitris Christofias as president and interlocutor of the Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat, who was elected on a pro-solution ticket, soon faded away as Christofias decided to maintain his tenuous grip to power through the support of Marios Garoyian's Democratic Party and Yiannakis Omirou's Movement for Social Democracy that were sceptical of, or inimical to a solution along the lines of the Annan Plan. The master tactician of Cypriot politics who had publicly expressed his ambition to bring about the reunification of Cyprus was overcome by his desire to cling to power, first as Leader of the Commons under President Papadopoulos and, then as President himself, and wasted a probably unique opportunity to achieve it.

As the Republic of Cyprus has been hit by the economic crisis and is especially vulnerable due to its exposure to the frail Greek banking system and its dependence on Russian, Serbian and Arab capital of dubious provenance, the Cyprus issue has not dominated this presidential election. Interestingly, after the obstructionism of the Papadopoulos presidency, the rejection of the Annan plan despite official Greek Cypriot expressions of commitment to it at the time, there is very little international interest in reviving a process that the Greek-Cypriot leadership had stopped in its tracks.

Nevertheless, the first round of the presidential election indicates that the front runner, Nicos Anastasiadis, is almost certain to be returned as the winner. To be sure, Anastasiadis will need the support of the 45.5% of the electorate that has voted for him in the first round as he faces unique challenges. First, he will need to finalise the protracted negotiations with the EU, the ECB and the IMF over receiving bailout funds that the outgoing President Christofias, has not been able to secure - he will need to overcome the credibility deficit that his two predecessors had created when they rejected the Annan plan and opted for a populist style of leadership, based on complacency and the spread of conspiracy theories. He will also need to confront the offspring of the populism of the past decade, expressed in the nationalism of one of the contenders for the presidency, George Lilikas, whose rhetoric echoes the conspiracy theory-inspired discourse of his Greek counterpart Panos Kammenos, head of Anexartitoi Ellines. He will finally have to fight the defeated and divided AKEL, which after ten years of disastrous policies and lack of inspired leadership is trying to expunge its past and project its failures to its opponents; as a well informed Greek commentator points out, AKEL is likely to forget it presided over a government that requested EU and IMF funds for the bailout of the Cypriot economy and will almost certainly engage in uncompromising rejectionism on that front.

Anastasiadis, following the example of his predecessor at the helm of his party, Glafkos Clerides, has managed to unify its members behind the banner of the reunification of Cyprus, despite the fact that one of its constituent elements hails from the nationalist right. Unlike Christofias, he has unequivocally supported the Annan plan at some cost. He has been pushed into the political wilderness through the concerted effort of AKEL and its centrist/anti-unification allies but has consistently pursued a solution agenda. In the current political landscape of the Republic, he is the only political personality that has got the commitment and resolve to work towards that goal.

But the current conditions, both nationally and internationally, are not as favourable as they were at the time the Annan plan was on the table. The Republic no longer has the ability to provide the financial incentives and the much needed transfers of funds for the development of the North that would make a reunification solution viable. The Turkish Cypriots may still be relatively isolated but have benefited from the relaxation of policies that sought to bring them to the negotiation table. Turkey has developed a more diverse foreign policy and, while still seeking EU membership, is in no hurry to join until the EU confronts its current political and financial challenges. Internally, he has to address the shift in Greek-Cypriot public opinion that the 'No' campaign against the Annan Plan and the subsequent vindictive witch-hunt of those who begged to differ have brought about. He has to articulate a new vision of a united Cyprus against all those who will resort to similar tactics to frighten the Greek Cypriots, to create and capitalise on public resentment on foreign conspiracies to undermine Cypriot sovereignty with imposed Annan plans, bailouts, or attempts to restrict Cyprus's sovereign right to determine its EEZ and exploit the natural gas deposits in it.

Perhaps this is a tall order. An Anastasiadis presidency though may be the last hope for the reunification of the wounded island. The 25th of February will provide some clues as to the future of Cyprus.