Insight from Istanbul, Turkey.

This post was also posted on Dr. İbikoğlu’s blog.

AKP’s acronym stands for Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, i.e. Justice and Development Party. For years, the leaders of the party preferred using AK Parti. As you might know, “ak” means “white” in Turkish. The obvious reference in “AK Parti” was to cleanliness, transparency and innocence. In essence, the party climbed to power in the wake of many corruption scandals which marginalized mainstream parties such as ANAP and DYP in the 1990s. Fast forward a decade or so, and many AKP leaders, including Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself, are now facing allegations of corruption through leaked tapes of phone-tapping.

The first wave of these tapes emerged on December 17, 2013, when many high profile figures were taken into custody by the police for interrogation. These figures included the sons of three ministers in the cabinet, an Azeri business tycoon, and the CEO of a state of owned bank. The police had recovered millions of Turkish Liras and foreign currency hidden in some of the apartments.

I might try to provide a full chronological account of what happened since December 17 in a later post, but the government simply identified the allegations of corruption, the leaked tapes, and the police operation as yet another attempt at forcefully removing AKP from power – a coup. This time, the attacking power was neither the “military,” nor the “deep state.” It was the “parallel state.” Erdoğan and other AKP leaders identified the Fethullah Gülen movement (an Islam-inspired movement, also called Cemaat or the Hizmet movement) as the parallel state which allegedly controlled key nodes in the police and judiciary. Cemaat and AKP had cooperated since the latter’s establishment in 2001. For reasons yet to be found out, the cooperation ended in late 2013 and AKP and Cemaat went for each other’s throat. AKP leaders tried to discredit the tapes and police operations by arguing that the “timing was meaningful.” In their argumentation, the prosecutors and the police of the Cemaat accumulated tapes and cases against prominent AKP figures over time to circulate them at the most suitable time when it would hurt the most.

The AKP government reacted swiftly against the police and the prosecutors. Hundreds of police chiefs and officers were removed from office over the following weeks. Eventually those prosecutors who were in charge of the corruption case were reassigned as well. After these removals, there simply was no hope left for a decent investigation, prosecution and trial. Turkish political arena is familiar to instrumental exploitation of the law, but not to such blatant disregard of the law by those in power. I would like to come back to this topic in later posts, but today I want to talk about AKP’s rapid burial under allegations of corruption, despite its legislative strength and executive power, which successfully evades judicial control for the moment. How could AKP sink under such allegations when they appeared most powerful?

The answer lies in two main institutional factors: 1) AKP motto that prioritizes “getting things done” and “providing services”; and 2) Increased personification of AKP under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

1) Before forming the AKP and becoming the prime minister, Erdoğan had served as the mayor of Istanbul for many years in 1990s. He was renowned for getting Istanbul in order and providing many services which were neglected before him. As the mayor, he fixed the problems with garbage collection and improved public transportation among other issues. It is my belief that Erdoğan approached the governance of Turkey with a similar mindset. Within this frame of mind, Turkey faced important infrastructural deficiencies and Erdoğan would fix these issues. It is not a coincidence that the main item in AKP’s developmental agenda had always been construction: Construction of roads, bridges, houses, etc… Recently, the AKP government has been adamant about building a third bridge over the Bosphorus. Another important (crazy?) project under discussion has been to open a second canal to the west of Istanbul that would mimic the Bosphorus… One of the key new official agencies in this construction oriented framework was TOKİ (Housing Development Administration), which has been operating in almost every urban center and beyond to build new large residential neighborhoods.

I am sure many citizens approve these developmental projects which turned Turkey into one large construction site over the last decade. Here, I do not want to discuss and evaluate the costs and benefits of a developmental agenda that prioritizes construction beyond anything else. However, it is a fact that such an endeavor fosters a colossal construction and real estate market. It also requires readjustment of city plans to accommodate these new roads, bridges, and neighborhoods. It requires destruction of old neighborhoods and relocation of many residents. I think it is at this critical juncture where the seeds of AKP’s burial under allegations of corruption were sown.

In its haste to “develop” Turkey through construction, AKP wanted to “get things done” quickly. Judicial controls, legal requirements, and local assemblies were hurdles in AKP’s path to development and modernization. In AKP’s view, courts were throwing away valuable projects, and legal requirements were causing delays in important projects. I strongly believe that AKP institutionalized extralegal practices over the years to cut corners short. In their bid to “provide better services,” AKP oversaw the crystallization of a collective ethos within its own ranks that sacrificed the law in exchange for rapid progress. We can come up with many examples but I will suffice here with a new case I read in my friend Tuna’s forthcoming article on privatization of Sümerbank factories and lands across the country.

The Sümerbank (a state-owned textile factory) in Malatya, which was situated on 129 thousand square meters, was privatized in 2004. A conglomerate of local firms had bid and bought the factory and its premises. As had been the case for such acts of privatization in industrial zones, the factory was soon demolished and plans for building a shopping mall were underway simultaneously with a zoning change that turned the area into a commercial zone. In exchange for the zone change, a part of the land was given to the Municipality as the site of the new municipal building, (which is now operational,) free of charge! In addition to the shopping mall, which has been a huge success, new plans have been underway to build a private hospital, a five-star Hilton hotel, and a large mosque on the rest of the land.

This is a perfect AKP win-win scenario: i) A formerly inefficient factory was reintroduced into urban space with no cost to the public; ii) A new municipal building was built with almost no cost to the public; iii) With a new hospital, hotel, and mosque, a livelier urban space and economy was promoted with no cost to the public. I will not delve into the topic of lost jobs at the old Sümerbank factory, or the alternative ways in which that land could have been utilized, or the extra income that the dubious privatization could have provided if the factory land were declared as a commercial zone at the outset. Such routes would simply fail to achieve rapid urban development that the AKP leadership adamantly seeks. Here, I am interested in that collective ethos that seriously perceives this particular path of urban development as successful municipal service. In an ideal type AKP privatization of a public asset, the public would be appeased with no-cost urban development, businesses would thrive with favorable land sales or zone-changes, and those happy businesses would grace the public with donations or would renovate public buildings for free. Within this conception, which prioritizes fast-paced construction at the expense of the law, lies the roots of institutionalized corruption that now bogs AKP down. Because, this type of extralegal actions could (and did) easily degenerate. (I call these actions extralegal not because they defy the law, but because they defy a certain sense of right and justice. To be honest, zoning changes and public donations appear legal on paper. However, it is also clear that they are motivated by favoritism.)

2) So far, I have assumed that AKP was motivated by doing good, i.e. “getting things done” and “providing services.” I will not succumb to the assumption of evilness that AKP members have always been corrupt. I just do not believe that large bodies of people happen to be bad. Instead, we have to search for institutional structures that condition them to act in such ways. As I argued, AKP’s particular conception of rapid urban development set the stage for an ethos of extralegal activities. However, how could the entire party (including its almighty pious leader) get involved in corruption? There still seems to be a huge gap between doing business in murky extralegal terrain and outright corruption, especially within a party whose basis of foundation was being clean and transparent. I believe the answer lies within increased personification of AKP under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As a consequence, AKP failed to develop necessary institutional intra-party mechanisms to combat and prevent corruption within ranks.

Over the years, AKP increasingly became a one-man party. Especially since the 2011 elections, AKP representatives have been hesitant about making definitive comments on key issues that fall outside the boundaries of their immediate roles. Erdoğan has increasingly become the sole authoritative voice of the party. His recent conflicts with Bülent Arınç, the spokesperson of the cabinet and an important senior member of the AKP movement, portray the rising tensions within AKP over Erdoğan’s authoritarian tendencies.

Erdoğan’s increased control over the party is reminiscent of mid-20th century corporatist regimes around the world, where a single leader had represented the entire constituency through a vertically organized party structure. This single-man rule is naturally very jealous in sharing power. Political advancement within ranks is based on winning the favor of the leader. Then, it is not a coincidence that Erdoğan preferred to appoint a significant number of his old friends (for example, İdris Naim Şahin and Erdoğan Bayraktar) to crucial posts in the cabinet over the years. Erdoğan’s personal trust mattered the most.

I do not believe AKP was destined to follow this corporatist route. As Jenny White (2002) described in her important study, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics, AKP started out with a very active grasroots organization. This momentum could have formed the basis of a more participatory and accountable party structure that would enable more local participation within the party leadership. However, increased idolization and deification of Erdoğan did not allow the AKP to develop institutions, which would provide natural checks on abuse of authority. Increasingly, local AKP leaders felt accountable only to Erdoğan, but not to their own constituencies. I believe that the lack of institutional checks on local and national AKP leaders enabled the descent from extralegality to corruption.

Erdoğan’s governing style i) that perceived Turkey as one big municipality; ii) that anchored development in rapid urban construction projects at the expense of the law; iii) and that relied on personal networks of trust and friendship resulted in the simple impossibility of personally overseeing the transfers of huge sums of money. Getting public projects done for free eventually degenerated into collecting funds for the party, which degenerated into taking bribes. Simply, this is why democracies rely on judicial control and legal regulations to oversee such expenditures. When the law is overthrown to cut corners short, and alternative disciplinary mechanisms are not employed, corruption ensues. In Turkey, Erdoğan and AKP are now buried under it.

~~~~~

Arda İbikoğlu is an alumnus of the M.A. in International Studies Program. He also has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the UW and Middle East experts from JSIS served on his doctoral committee. He is an expert in Turkish and Middle East politics and his research focuses on Turkish political prisoners and changing state-society relations in Turkey from the Ottoman Empire to the present. He has published articles and book chapters on this subject, including an article featured in a Special Issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society that highlighted the “next generation” of interdisciplinary legal studies. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.

You can follow Dr. İbikoğlu on Twitter here.

Insight from London, England

The Union Jack seems unique among national flags to truly capture an essential feature of the people it represents. It is in fact three flags stacked on top of each other: the English cross of St. George sits as the undeniable foundation, with the crosses of Saints Patrick and Andrew of Ireland and Scotland, respectively, superimposed. It’s as if when a hurried official came suddenly into some room in Westminster and said, ‘we need a flag to represent the newly created United Kingdom’, someone replied, flummoxed, ‘uhhh…ummm…could we just put them on top of each other?’ It’s the kind of creativity one imagines contributed to the naming of towns and cities up and down the East Coast of the United States: Worcester, New York, New Hampshire, New Haven, New Jersey, Plymouth…‘It’s not worth fussing over’, says the credo, ‘let’s go with what works and get on with it’.

The British are famed for not wanting to make a fuss and it is probably the one national stereotype that actually holds true. Of course, there are a million ways to define Britishness, and many would say it doesn’t exist at all. According to some, you’re either English, Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish – you may even be Cornish! How could one word describe all these people when their accents are so different? Whatever. For the time being, these nationalities are in it together, whether they like it or not (and chances are they don’t).

But for all the fuss about not being fussy, lots of people around the UK are in a hissy over a great many things at the moment. Most notable are the upcoming referendum for Scottish independence and an in-out referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union should the Conservative Party win re-election in 2015. If the Scots leave the UK and the UK leaves the EU, what will the Union Jack look like then?

As it turns out, exactly the same. The Scots would still have the Queen as their head of state and the EU has nothing to do with the flag, to everyone’s great relief. But once the cardinal rule of Not Making A Fuss is so completely contravened, how well can the quintessentially makeshift flag represent a country which in its new incarnation will have taken a lot of deliberate, determined effort to remake?

Not very. The 1707 Act of Union – when Scotland became part of the United Kingdom – prompted the creation of the Union Jack. The country was on the up. Ahead of it were over two-hundred years of global imperial dominance unknown to any other power in history. The Roman Empire is a joke compared to what the British achieved. In the 18th and 19th centuries, then, the Union Jack, insofar as it represented the essential qualities of the British people, was a projection of their country’s glory. In cities and ports around the world, the sight of the flag inspired admiration, respect, loathing, and on more than a few occasions it inspired fear. Regardless of the message, what is inarguable is that it mattered.

But if the Scots choose independence and the rest of the UK stumbles belligerently out of the European Union, it will mark a turning point for what the Union Jack represents. Not only will the purportedly least fussy country on the planet show itself to actually be rather high maintenance, it will also be an undeniable marker of decline. Pockets of the UK will be very nice places to visit—‘castles countryside, old churches and more!’ –but, on the whole, the country will matter less and be poorer.

As an American living in the UK and married to a Briton, but still roughly five years away from UK citizenship, it’s debatable whether my opinion matters. All the same, here’s to hoping the Union Jack still matters once I do take the hallowed vow of Not Making a Fuss, whatever the phrase has come to mean by then.

~~~~~

Jeffrey P. Lupo lives in London and intends to practice law in England and Wales. He graduated from the Jackson School in 2010. Jeffrey is the co-founder of the Jackson School Journal of International Studies.

Insight from Istanbul, Turkey.

This post was also posted on Dr. İbikoğlu’s blog where he has been contextualizing the Turkish protests.

I have shared some protest graffiti before. This time I will try to translate some other examples of ingenious protest humor. This is gonna be fun!

You shall step on wet bathroom slippers with socks on your feet RTE (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan)

A perfect peaceful curse, don’t you think?

Here is a perfect artwork that plays with the AKP emblem. No commentary needed!

Another piece that symbolizes the #occupygezi’s reliance on twitter. Just perfect!

TEAR GAS

Pepper Dolma

These two images are awesome examples of reappropriating the opponent’s arsenal through disproportionate use of intelligence. The empty cases in these images are empty tear gas cannisters. The first one is used as a lemonade cup with a sliced lemon and a straw. The second one is even better. Tear gas is called “pepper gas” (biber gazı) in Turkish. As you know, Turkey has delicious pepper dolma (biber dolması), i.e. fat green peppers stuffed with rice. Well, there is a stuffed pepper for you!

What helps against tear gas? Vinegar! Lemon!

Unless you lived in Turkey throughout the 1980s and 1990s, you will most likely miss the reference in this one. The actress on the left is Adile Naşit, and the actor on the right is Münir Özkul. They are both veterans of Turkish cinema. I grew up watching their movies. These two scenes are from the same comedy movie Neşeli Günler! (1978 – Happy Days!). This couple, with six kids, have a shop where they sell pickled vegetables and pickle juice. In the opening scenes of the movie, they get into a huge argument about whether the best pickles are made with vinegar or lemon. I really want to congratulate the genious who made the connection between that argument in that movie and tear gas. As you might know, lemon and vinegar are both very helpful in soothing the effects of tear gas! (In case you were wondering, the argument between the couple ends up in a divorce and she leaves the house with three of the kids in a heartbreaking scene. The movie is about how the kids find each other many years later and eventually convince their parents to come together again.)

Erdoğan sitting on a throne of empty tear gas cannisters. It is quite a powerful image. The shape of the throne is another reference to famous TV series, Game of Thrones, based on George R. R. Martin novels.

THE PENGUINS!

If you were wondering how the penguins got involved in the Gezi protests that very quickly enveloped the entire country, here is why. At 1:06 AM, on June 2, at the peak of demonstrations and clashes, CNNTÜRK, a franchise of CNN, was broadcasting a documentary on penguins, whereas CNN International was broadcasting the ongoing events live on the ground. This irony was not lost to the protesters and soon penguins became somewhat of a symbol for #OccupyGezi.

Above is a cartoon mocking CNNTÜRK.

And the penguins were spotted in the protests.
Then the mockery got out of control of course! A video from Bobiler.com

“To Chapul”

On June 2, during the peak hours of protests and clashes, Prime Minister Erdoğan identified the protesters as  “birkaç çapulcu” (a few marauders). Çapulcu almost perfectly translates as marauders: 1) Those forces of the army that harassed and looted settlements on the other side of the border; 2) Looters during public upheavals. This identification was widely perceived as another arrogant remark by Erdoğan and pulled even more people into streets in protest over the following days. Then, as in the case of empty tear gas cannisters, protesters reappropriated “çapulcu” and deployed it as a humorous tool against Erdoğan and the government. For instance check out this wikipedia entry on “chapulling“, or this video below!:

Everyday I’m Chapulling! The next video is in Turkish but you might want to take a look if you need a crash course on this new verb in English:

And finally an international Çapulcu below!

Noam Chomsky

ÇARŞI

Beşiktaş FC fan group Çarşı (together with Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray fans) have been on the front lines of the clashes since the beginning of the protests. Çarşı fans even chased TOMAs (Toplumsal Olaylara Müdahele Aracı – Vehicle of Intervention in Public Events) with a bulldozer they got hold of. They eventually captured a TOMA as well, which they re-named as POMA (Polis Olaylarına Müdahele Aracı – Vehicle of Intervention in Police Events). Below is supposedly the account of the interaction with the police chief on radio when they captured the vehicle:

Chief: Open a hole in the barricades, don’t go in too much!
Toma 7: Understood!
Chief: Now move back, spraying water!
Toma 7: Understood!
Chief: Toma 9, you spray water at the same time too!
Toma 9: ZzZzZz
Chief: Toma 9!
Toma 9: I am Vedat, listening!
Chief: Oh, who is Vedat?
Toma 9: From the open stands, the drummer!
Chief: Toma 7, retreat!
Toma 7: Black!

The final “Black!” of Toma 7 is the beginning of the chant for Beşiktaş with jersey colors black and white. Almost a week after that incident, I came across this picture earlier today:

Left Çarşı activist: Do we have someone who can drive a helicopter?
Right Çarşı activist: If it doesn’t work, we can just drive it on the ground Vedat

Excellent joke about capturing a helicopter this time (while underlining the continuing airborne surveillance of Taksim Square) with a reference to Vedat, the POMA-captor!

The humor of Çarşı fans is also visible in the video below where Beşiktaş FC Çarşı fans call on the police to join the chant. They shout “Red” and the cops they have been fighting shout back “White” – in the colors of the national team. Emphasis on  mutual connections through the national football team is somewhat disarming after all…

The common theme in all of these humorous protests seem to be reappropriation of a tool in the opponent’s arsenal and its redeployment through the use of “disproportionate intelligence”. Let’s conclude with an excellent performance, which mocks Erdoğan’s identification of a protest method – hitting pots and pans together – as “Pots and pans, the same old tune!”:

~~~~~

Arda İbikoğlu is an alumnus of the M.A. in International Studies Program. He also has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the UW and Middle East experts from JSIS served on his doctoral committee. He is an expert in Turkish and Middle East politics and his research focuses on Turkish political prisoners and changing state-society relations in Turkey from the Ottoman Empire to the present. He has published articles and book chapters on this subject, including an article featured in a Special Issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society that highlighted the “next generation” of interdisciplinary legal studies. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.

You can follow Dr. İbikoğlu on Twitter here.

Insight from Istanbul, Turkey.

The following emails from Dr. İbikoğlu were reproduced here with his permission. Please note that they were sent to a friend and so the language is informal.

Dr. Ibikoglu has been posting about the Turkish protests on his blog.

Message 1 (March 31):
Hey, we are all fine. A long explanation would take pages. But, it started as an Occupy Movement couple days ago to protest and prevent government plans to uproot a small park in Taksim Square – Istanbul’s very central entertainment district. The police used tear gas, etc., to dissuade protesters, but more and more people have kept showing up over the past two days.

From what I hear, protesters are mostly people like you and me – not organized at all. Police violence brought more and more people and it completely got out of control last night. Even though just a few TV stations are broadcasting the real extent of the events, people heard about the massively disproportionate use of force online and hit the streets last night. People were on the streets all night. We are talking about thousands of people.

Why? Hard to tell really. The government’s Syria stand has been polarizing, but more importantly two recent events: 1) a new anti-alcohol law that bans selling after 10pm and restricts advertising and consumption in public spaces. 2) the ceremonious beginning of a third bridge on the Bosphorus which was named after Selim the Grim, an Ottoman Sultan known for his massacre of thousands of Anatolian Alevis during his conquest of Egypt back in the 16th century. Both of these (and the plans to change Taksim Square) were begun without any public debate.

I think the real cause is people’s anger in the government which received 50% of the votes in the last elections and now perceives itself above public debate. People supported Erdoğan and his party to overthrow the military’s antidemocratic control over the country. Having done that and having received 50% of the votes, now he sees himself as a Sultan-reincarnate.

I am still quite surprised with seeing so many people on the streets. It is an unlikely coalition out there at the moment. Socialist, Kemalists and whoever is pissed at the government are out there. I really do not think it can last. It would die out if the government comes back to its senses and avoids further violence on peaceful protesters. An economically prospering country and its historical capital out on the streets – really bizarre…

Even though I fail to understand it completely, it is overall pretty awesome. We got rid of the military’s anti-democratic control, and here people are on the streets when the popularly elected government seems to pursue increasingly authoritarian policies. This is gradual reform at its best.

Message 2 (June 1):
There are rumors about Twitter and Facebook shutting down but nothing of the sort happened yet.

It is crazy here. While I am writing this, my street is full with noise – people blowing whistles, hitting pans together in protest.

There are pictures of 40k people crossing the Bosphorus Bridge on foot.

This is all very exciting for public dissent. However, as you can imagine, I have mixed feelings about this. The protests about the park are all right on; the protests about the government’s anti-democratic policies and procedures are all right on. However, the bulk of the masses on the street right now are the supporters of the political movements that I find the most difficult: the Kemalists.

Who are the Kemalists? The supporters of the old regime where a bureaucratic elite (mainly the military and the judiciary) ruled Turkey with an iron fist from WWI. It is the first time a truly popular government took office and undermined these traditional arbiters of power. So some of the people protesting right now are no more true democrats at heart than the ones they are protesting against.

But does the government deserve to be criticized? Hell yeah! They overthrew the old elite but they owe a great deal to them ideologically and they do not see any problems in utilizing the power and coercion networks of the old elite – as seen on the streets today with tear gas and other examples of disproportionate use of police violence.

On a more personal note: Is there ever going to be a political movement/protest that I will feel at home and not over-analyze to oblivion?

Message 3 (June 2):
That Tüfekçi post is great. [Here, Dr. İbikoğlu is referring to a Dr. Zeynep Tüfekçi authored blog post that compares Egypt and Turkey and asks whether there is a social media fueled protest style.] Very accurate observations and analyses. The self-censorship of the media is true and very disturbing. On the other hand, she is also right about the limitations of comparisons to Tahrir. After all, AKP is a truly democratically elected government. It is excessive even to call it authoritarian. Plebiscitarian or majoritarian would be more accurate.

Anyway, as things have changed, I’m now worried about you posting these emails. I’m worried about criticizing the protesters now because it has become so politicized. I would not like to be publicly critical of them now even if there might be things to criticize.

Yesterday and earlier today, Erdoğan talked about the uprisings. He upped his own horribleness. He was very critical of the protesters, called them names (like brigands and marginals), and linked them to CHP (the Kemalist main opposition party). All inaccurate. He is either completely unaware of the extent of the spontaneous nature of the public uprising or he is intentionally misidentifying it to his own electorate who won’t hear about the story from their own media sources because of the media blackout.

But then, I was outside just earlier and many people with Turkish flags were blocking the street, honking, chanting, etc. just as I was about to come back inside, a group about at least 500 people were slowly marching down the street.

I hate the use of the Turkish flag in this context. It is suddenly a nationalist event… so go ahead post my e-mails if you like. I don’t mind being a bit critical of some of the protesters because I am supportive of the cause of protesting too. It highlights many of the divisions here.

Message 4 (June 2):
I have read some accounts of the protests today. There are some quite simplistic ones that identify the conflict as a Muslims vs secular protest. I don’t think you can boil it down to that…

This started as a small protest of the environmental activists but when the disproportionate violence they faced was shared in social media, more people kept rushing in and it escalated into a scale that practically no one foresaw.

But as it stands, I think the composition of the participants differ from place to place. Those people at Taksim, those people who have been clashing with the police at Beşiktaş for the past 24 hours, and those people who were clashing with the police and were dispersed and/or taken into custody only an hour ago at Ankara, are mostly (socialist, environmental, human rights) activists in their 20s and some others who are trying to hijack the protests and turn them into even more violent clashes. However, those people protesting on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, or at other cities (like at my hometown Balıkesir) are somewhat older folks who are more likely to identify themselves as secular nationalists and CHP supporters. Here, we see lots and lots of waving the Turkish flag and singing nationalist marches. As I wrote to you earlier yesterday, I feel a lot closer to those people literally fighting for the ground they are standing on at Taksim and Beşiktaş than the flag-wavers at the Baghdad Street.

Anyway, I think what the Prime Minister Erdoğan is missing (or intentionally avoiding) in his outrageous remarks yesterday, and earlier today, is the composition of this unlikely coalition on the streets that quite literally he himself has forged. All these people are united against his majoritarian/authoritarian rule but he insists calling them as “birkaç çapulcu”, a few marauders.

These spontaneous protests may prove to be the undoing of Erdoğan’s own coalition within which he had successfully incorporated liberal democrats, including influential public intellectuals. Only very recently, he had enlisted the support of influential public intellectuals such as Murat Belge, Mithat Sancar, Baskın Oran and Yılmaz Ensaroğlu to render support for the government’s efforts in forging a peace with the Kurdish movement. I am quite sure, Erdoğan and his party AKP will lose such liberal-democrat support after these protests.

In any case, I think Erdoğan’s resistence to appeasing the protesters and adding more fuel to the fire with increased police brutality is forging a stronger coalition against him and it is possibly weakening his own coalition. These protests may yet prove to be the biggest opponent for a party who ended the military authoritarian rule in Turkey.

** The photo attached to this post has been distributed widely but is attributed to REUTERS/Osman Orsal in this article. **

~~~~~

Arda İbikoğlu is an alumnus of the M.A. in International Studies Program. He also has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the UW and Middle East experts from JSIS served on his doctoral committee. He is an expert in Turkish and Middle East politics and his research focuses on Turkish political prisoners and changing state-society relations in Turkey from the Ottoman Empire to the present. He has published articles and book chapters on this subject, including an article featured in a Special Issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society that highlighted the “next generation” of interdisciplinary legal studies. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.

You can follow Dr. İbikoğlu on Twitter here.

Insight from Oxford, England.

I’ve been in the UK nearly three months now. I’ve settled in the city of Oxford where the dreaming spires exude the city’s haunting beauty, ancient intellectualism, and sacred atmosphere. It’s easy to think in these nostalgic narratives, Oxford is so beautiful. Though, reviews in the past have been mixed. Here are a couple opinions I find rather concerning:

“Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!” – Matthew Arnold

“The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it.” – C.S. Lewis

Fortunately, for me, I am here neither as a tormented poet or novelist. Nor a student for that matter. It seems odd to place myself in a city where academia permeates the air and not be a student at one of the colleges. I’m here on a five-month work internship with international children’s charity, Viva. My brief experience here has been incredibly formative — international development theories are coming alive, being confirmed and tested.

One of my questions coming here was to observe and measure the effectiveness of faith-based organizations vs. secular charities with similar goals and beneficiaries. Many development organizations target children as their main demographic – and this makes sense, as it is a strategy meant to go up stream and identify systematic issues “killing all the fish” as it were. Consequently, we’ve seen a large number of small non-profits popping up over the past decade responding to the needs of children in their respective communities, but they often lack the skills and support they need to offer those children a more secure future. They have plenty of compassion and commitment, but often struggle without the formal training and expertise their challenging jobs require. So many well-intentioned schemes have gone awry due to poor allocation of funds and vision – so I came to Oxford to find out what people here were doing to fix that.

Viva is a Christian grassroots organization that works in city networks, bringing together service providers, churches, government officials and other non-profits to offer the best future for children across the world. To me, it’s a brilliant model. Sharing resources, a comparative advantage of sorts, to actually change the landscape for children at risk. The model is based on working together to affect a greater result, not just starting up another non-profit that works with the same type of beneficiaries (of which I was mistaken for the other day! I guess things like this come with the territory if you’re the only Southeast Asian in a rural English village).

Like I mentioned, Viva prioritizes relationships with many local churches and uses a Christian faith-based approach to partnerships – this is brilliant because the church has historically always been the number one, immediate caregiver in local, developing countries. Churches will always have legitimacy in local communities that an outside organization may never achieve. Churches were there before foreign aid and will be there after everyone has left. These churches in addition to other indigenous groups are worth investing in for the transformative change many people like myself are hopeful to see.

I’m afraid the same can’t be said for UK churches. I visited one the other day and a lady passed out mid-service — to no one’s concern! The man next to her pretended it didn’t happen and it took nearly 30 minutes for a paramedic to arrive. It was quite the British experience.

In the spirit of optimism, I leave you with a favorable review of this most curious city:

“We were conscious all the time of the strong intellectual life of a thousand years. Despite the modern laboratories, Oxford is still ‘breathing the last enchantments of the middle ages.’” – Sheldon Vanauken

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Rebekah Kennel is an International Studies major and an Editor for the Jackson School Journal of International Studies. She also is a contributor to Sense and Sustainability, an organization and podcast devoted to sustainable development. Rebekah will graduate from UW this spring 2013.

Insight from Bucharest, Romania.

It’s hot. It’s so hot I can’t breathe and I wish this taxi had air-conditioning. I never wish for air-conditioning but all four windows are wide open and I still feel like I am suffocating. It is so bright outside that the industrial buildings stretching from the airport to Bucharest city are white-washed, bleached as if my eyes are a camera, set on over-expose. The driver is smoking and talking on his phone and looking over his shoulder at me at the same time. He has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. Walking through the airport I was struck over and over again by blue, blue eyes and dark, dark skin. Later at my hotel I will Google “blue eyes Romania.” I end up in a rabbit hole of stories about blue-eyed Arabs, and dating sites for men to meet hot young Romanian women, conspiracy theorists talking about blue-eyes sometimes being a dominant gene instead of a recessive one, and a Wikipedia article about how Estonia’s population is 99% blue eyed.  I scour the television stations to catch sight of these blue eyes again. But the airport is the only place I see them.

I am in Bucharest, Romania for two weeks to work for the secretariat of an international environmental treaty on wetlands, biodiversity and climate change–the Ramsar Convention. It is their triennial COP, or Conference of the Parties, where delegates from about 153 different countries come together to negotiate environmental policy, which they will then take home with them and implement.

In the taxi I remind myself that the areas around airports are always ugly–that what I am seeing is not going to be indicative of what the city or the rest of Romania will be like. I’m right. As we drive down the Bulevardul Regina Elisabeta I see towering old buildings; buildings that rival places I have seen in Paris. Except these buildings are crumbling and covered in graffiti–colorful spray paint and ancient gold rooftops. The taxi driver is giving me the scenic tour. I have a feeling that this is going to cost me, but I am just glad I didn’t have to take the bus.  At the airport the idea of figuring out public transport in this heat seemed staggering.

The taxi driver decides I need a tour guide. I speak English, Afrikaans, and very basic French and Persian. He speaks French, Italian, broken English and Romanian. He keeps trying to tell me about the buildings we see in Italian. I just shake my head and smile. Parks and crumbling megaliths pass by me. The heat is unbearable but it begins to feel good to my heat starved skin. I’m surprised that no one honks at us. This man drives with a cigarette and a cellphone and rarely has a hand on the steering wheel. I keep smiling. I wonder who he is talking to.  I can’t tell if it’s me, or the person I can hear on the phone. It doesn’t seem to matter to him.  He keeps talking, mentioning the Pentagon, wildly, waving his hands and veering into oncoming traffic.

At the hotel I pay the taxi driver 150 Ron, three times what my ride should have cost. I sleep all afternoon and straight through the night. The next day I sit at the registration desk in the Palace of the Parliament, where we are holding this summer’s COP. The secretariat staff is small, and at the conference is expected to take on many different jobs and roles. It is the host country’s responsibility to pay for the meeting, and to supply extra volunteers.  One of the Romanian volunteers, a man of 20 has been smiling at me all morning. Finally he works up the courage to sit down next to me. He asks me where I am from and what I’m doing here. We talk about school. He is studying law at the University of Bucharest. He had to pull strings to get an invitation to work at the COP. He wants to work for the government. I soon learn from the volunteers that everyone in Romania wants to work for the government. It could just be that I have a biased sample, but it reminds me of an article I read at home about Morocco and how the children of the country’s elite all have government jobs waiting for them when they graduate. I think of growing up in South Africa. There is something about the chaos and bizarre dichotomy between rich and poor, first world Lamborghinis and third world poverty, I see here that I recognize. I feel oddly at home.

The volunteer is trying to tell me about Romania. I ask him about the people and he tells me about the gypsies. He says they are awful. They are an embarrassment to Romania. They are “welfare suckers.” I try to keep smiling and ask him what he means. I want to know what he thinks. Gypsies in my mind seem romantic. To Romanians they aren’t. I wonder if they are blue eyed. I ask him about the blue-eyed people. He says, “Oh no, those are fine.”

I have been having my ideas of ethnicity, national identity and race challenged constantly since leaving South Africa, where there were only two races, black and white.  I left South Africa and came to an America that perceived race in places I had never been asked to look, and now, here, to a country that defines race amongst people I can’t tell apart. Nobody in the government building has blue eyes. I am at a loss for how to ask about this.

I become uncomfortable talking to him.  Our conversation slowly fizzles out. He moves on to more interesting targets. He walks like an old man, and has the hunched back and the flat-pooched belly and the hands of an old man. He is the type of twenty year old that looks and behaves like he should be 80; his ideas about people and government are just as dated. I wonder about what will happen when he becomes a government official.

For the first few days of the conference the Romanian staff is running around us wheeling plants and flower pots, rolling out carpets and putting up signs. The bulk of the volunteers don’t arrive till three days in.

The secretariat staff is from all over the world. I am working next to an American woman who is in her 50’s and stands like a flamingo on one leg. She becomes our daily news broadcaster. We spend most of the duration of the conference talking about this building with its enormous foyers and vast wings of empty unused rooms. And its ghosts.

On the evening of the first night over drinks a co-worker tells me that the Palace of the Parliament, the grand, ornate building we are working in was only built 40 years ago. That it is the second largest building in the world, second only to the Pentagon. Suddenly I understand what the taxi driver had been trying to tell me.

It is as hot inside the building as it is outside. We are told over and over again that there is no air-conditioning in the building. We ask about the huge vents we see everywhere, and we apologize to the delegates that start to arrive en-sweating masse. The women I work with and I sit and gossip with an intimacy that is forged by close living and working quarters.  Between registering 800 delegates and observer parties, we fan ourselves desperately with pamphlets meant for delegates, we fight over rationed pens that keep going missing. Languages snake past me at lightning speed. The convention works in three languages so as a rule most of the staff speak two and often three. But the delegates speak thousands, and all day snippets of conversation drift by me. The staff alters their language according to whom they are speaking to, and I sit and listen to stories in French and Spanish. I blink every time someone speaks to me in Romanian. It takes us a few seconds to realize I don’t understand what they are saying.

One of the French women working with me tells me she hates this building. She talks about the 80’s and watching the video of Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s execution, which was aired on national television. She is upset at having to work in a building that is so symbolically linked to them. The American woman tells me about how a friend had to escape Romania during the 1980’s, leaving her family behind  never to be seen again.

Most of Bucharest’s architecture is made up of buildings built during the Communist era and the Palace of the Parliament, in all its ornate marbled splendor, is no exception. Nicolae Ceaușescu demolished huge portions of the historic center of Bucharest in order to construct it. He literally razed the previously historic sections of the city and built his Paris of the East from scratch in his project of systemization.

I now understand what the taxi driver had been pointing at, during my very expensive and unsolicited guided tour. Tens of thousands of houses had been destroyed. Later that night, walking to a supermarket in search of snacks a co-worker explained that in the 1980’s 40,000 people were evicted with only a day’s notice as he razed an 8 square kilometer area, as part of his redevelopment scheme. Back when the world was divided in three. Back when I was born. A whole twenty-six years ago. His ghost is still here, in this building,  in this city, and amongst us, people from far away places and distant time.

As the days and the heat blur together and conversations snippet in and out around me, I feel like time starts to resemble a stop animation film, and I am constantly trying to puzzle this place together. Slowly, like drip filtration I become aware that there is something else happening in this building. There are parts we aren’t allowed to access, that contain the seat of government. On the second day, the American woman announces that there is going to be a coup. That the current president Traian Basescu is being ousted by Prime Minister Victor Ponta over allegations he had abused his powers. We suddenly find we are unwitting participants in this drama, by simple accident. Every now and then a lost politician comes in the wrong door and walks past us, at one point Basescu and Ponta are standing in front of me shaking hands. Angela Merkel walks by me.

Everything starts to get very exciting. In between long days of work, and the political dramas in the convention itself, we are riveted by what is happening in the building around us.

Information comes to us in bits and pieces, some of it is nonsense, and some of it is accurate. It takes time to sort out which is which. It’s impossible to find English news in Romania. You can watch Xena the Warrior Princess on repeat and Chuck Norris movies and old American television. There is CNN Europe, but everything is happening so fast that it seems like the rest of the world hasn’t caught on yet. Locked in the building all day working we don’t really now what’s happening outside, there are reports of burning buildings which turn out to be standard house fires, student uprisings, which turn out to be small and talk of a coup d’etat keeps resurfacing.

Being a part of what happens and trying to understand it at the same time is very difficult. The only source of information we have is an opinion piece by Paul Krugman in the New York Times.  I think about a class I took with Ellis Goldberg on the Arab Spring and realize this is what he was talking about when he described being in Cairo at the start of the Egyptian uprising.

The next day we learn that it is not a coup after all, but that the parliament has voted to impeach President Traian Basescu.

On my final day I have some free time. The volunteer, who first told me about gypsies also told me that the video of the Ceaușescu’s execution was available on YouTube if I was interested. I had politely declined. But, I go see their graves though in a final bid to my morbid curiosity. I want to say goodbye to this person who’s building I have been hosted in, who’s streets I have walked in and who has left such a strange legacy behind.

The final evening is hot. We wonder the old town district and seek tables in the vast oceans of outdoor seating, between thick clouds of smoke and faces of all ages and expensive cars and taxis and gypsies and beautiful, beautiful Romanian women. There are Gypsies everywhere. I think about South Africa again in relation to this new democracy also still dealing with the vapors of its past. A lot of it is very similar and then a lot of it is not

It will take time for me after leaving to put all this information into perspective and I will finally relent and watch the video. It is sad and hollow, and leaves me feeling intense grief, for both the atrocities committed by Nicolae and Elena, but also for the horrific way in which they died. The narrator uses a quote by Karl Marx at the end of the video, and it seems fitting; “Men make their own history but they do not make it as they choose.”

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Rachel Brown is a Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations major and Editor for the Jackson School Journal of International Studies.  She is also the Assistant Director for the Odegaard Writing and Research Center. In her spare time she is a certified mediator working in Washington state.

Rachel has worked with the Ramsar Convention for the last two Conference of the Parties, in South Korea and in Romania. The next one will be in Uruguay. Rachel grew up in South Africa and moved to the US in 2008. She will graduate from UW in 2014 and intends to spend her senior year at the Sciences Po in France studying Arabic and French and completing her thesis.

Insight from Álora, Spain.

Looking at a map of the Guadalhorce watershed, I traced the blue line of the river through the towns dotted along the valley. The water in this valley provides life and livelihood to this region of Southern Spain, serving as a source of irrigation for agriculture and drinking water for many small communities and the large, coastal city of Málaga. The river has served these purposes since the time of the Romans, when the region of Andalucía was developed as a breadbasket for the growing empire. The Moorish civilization continued to develop the water infrastructure by building elaborate canals, some of which are still in use today. These systems have lasted for centuries, but today as aridity increases in Southern Spain, the traditional allocations of water and the rural culture it supports are under pressure to change.

Water has a subtle but constant presence in the political conversations of Spain. Over my two months abroad, almost every newspaper that I picked up had an article about water. El País, a major national news source, chronicled drought in the interior, the increasing salinization of wells and the politics of water allocation. Though the discussions rarely made front-page headlines, the controversies over water governance are growing as Spain looks toward a future of scarcity. Water connects everything from the lemon groves of the Guadalhorce to the global politics of the Spanish debt crisis, and climate change and an unforgiving global economy is forcing the Spanish government to grapple with setting some new priorities.

When it comes to lawmaking, the Spanish statute has codified a hierarchy for national water allocation. Officially, drinking water is prime, followed by irrigation, industry and ecology. This simple principle, though touted as a logical precept, gives little consideration to the historical and cultural value of water. Debates emerging over water governance are not simply economic concerns, but rather a national conversation about the values of maintaining rural and agrarian traditions in the face of growing cities and urban water requirements.

In the Guadalhorce watershed, the Junta de Andalucía (the state-level government) is charged with creating regional water distribution plans that reflect this hierarchy. Some years, there is plenty of water, yet the farmers and low level officials all know that those years are becoming fewer and farther between. The question for governance then becomes a delicate one. When there simply is not enough water to fulfill all of the needs, which one’s are really the most important? Whose needs should be served first?

According to the national hierarchy, the growing urban demand for drinking water in Málaga takes priority, decreasing the amount available for the small towns and farms in the interior. A region already suffering from the economic crisis, a decrease in water allocation (and subsequent harvest and profits) would make many families in this region hard-pressed to remain in the country. Such an allocation might drive rural communities to abandon their lifestyles and head for the growing metropolises, leaving their centuries of customary life behind them. The traditional knowledge of the region might fade and the typical orchards of lemons, oranges and olives would gradually disappear. The people of the Guadalhorce have already started to migrate into the urban sprawl surrounding Málaga or other larger cities and it is quite possible that the people in this region would slowly lose their connection with this land.

Many in the Guadalhorce are painfully aware that this social and cultural change is already beginning. Over my time in Álora, a small citrus farming community, the contest between drinking water and agriculture was clearly charged by the threat of loosing access to a traditional lifestyle. Almost as an act of passive resistance, many small irrigators have refused water-saving irrigation technology and continue to use the traditional, method of flood-irrigation in an effort to preserve their culture. At the same time, in all of my conversations with irrigators and water managers I expected to hear some remark about the wasteful use of water in Málaga. Large hotels and the swells of three-showers-per-day tourists in the summertime were the most common complaint, but I could tell that the real concern for these farmers was simply that the state was starting to give up on them. The priorities have shifted to the city and the cultural benefits of small town life are being quietly forgotten..

In terms of sustainability, the problem that Spain faces is really a challenge of choosing what to sustain. Should the government maintain support of these agriculturalists in an effort to maintain a cultural heritage? In a water-scarce world where you can’t have it all, it is important that all governments begin to consider how to value culture and tradition in water resource use.

On the 19th of July, the headline of the New York Times read: “Severe Drought Expected to Worsen Across the Nation.” I put down the paper, thinking about the climatic realities that connect us all… and about their widespread consequences. Higher food prices and increasing rural poverty, forced migrations, economic shocks and cultural change. Water connects everything and the USA will grapple with many of the same challenges that Spain faces in the coming years.  Our country and much of the world will have to adapt to a new resource reality, being mindful of the cultural, social and economic implications of changing water governance. Although I do not pretend to have any answers about what should be sustained or how this might be achieved, I do know that when it comes to water we must consider culture and identity very strongly in any change in policy.

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Sarah Boone is a senior in the Peace, Security and Diplomacy track of the Jackson School of International Studies and is minoring in Environmental Studies. She is also writing an honors thesis on water scarcity and conflict resolution in the Middle East. She is the current Editor-in-Chief of the Jackson School Journal.

Sarah was in Spain at the UW León Center.  She was enrolled in a program focused on water and especially on the operation of public policy, law, and customary practice as forces that shape how water is used and understood. For the first few weeks of the program, students reviewed case-study literature on water governance from around the world and studied Spanish intensively. Following this, the class conducted fieldwork in the Guadalhorce Valley which was largely comprised of interviews with farmers and low level officials. The research was conducted in collaboration with a team from Wageningen University that specializes in water resources in this region. The UW study abroad program was lead by Professor Gregory Hicks (UW School of Law) and Katherine R. Kroeger (Office of Global Affairs).

Insight from Berlin, Germany.

Living in Berlin, a city caught up in a selective forgetting and remembering of the physical past, it is not hard to stumble across something with a hidden or little-known history. On July 20th, a few classmates and I went exploring in the city, and came upon the Memorial to the German Resistance, also known as the Bendlerblock. The Bendlerblock is better known through the context of Operation Valkyrie; the area was used as the headquarters for the Wehrmacht officers who carried out the July 20 plot against Adolf Hitler. General Olbricht, Colonel von Stauffenberg, Werner von Haeften, and Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim were executed by firing squad in the courtyard of the building for conspiracy. Currently, the courtyard is home to the Memorial to the German Resistance.

On the afternoon I stumbled across the memorial, a crowd of German police and official cars lined the street around the entrance, while several dozen older Germans surrounded the entrance gate, watching a ceremony within. I approached the gates and watched the processions within; German military forces laid wreaths around the memorial statue, while relatives, German elite and officials sat in rows before the memorial plaque. Being the 20th of July, I had stumbled across the 67th anniversary of the attempt to assassinate Hitler. Ceremonies took place throughout Berlin and across Germany on the 20th, in remembrance of German resistance fighters. German Federal President Christian Wulff, Bundestag President Norbert Lammert, Defense Minister Thomas de Maizière and other officials participated in the wreath-laying ceremony at the Bendlerblock, and a later service was held at Plötzensee Memorial Center, where the Nazis had tried, imprisoned and executed thousands of resistors. At the end of the day, in tradition, new soldiers took ceremonial oaths in a ceremony in front of the Reichstag.

I had arrived at the end of the ceremony, and after a few minutes of wreath-laying, I was able to watch the glamourous procession of German statesmen, as they left the memorial flanked by secret service agents. Those of us watching from outside the gate were let into the memorial after the bulk of important figures had left, walking into the stark courtyard where the final nametags were being peeled from the rows of chairs. Aside from the center statue and a few plaques to the resistance, the courtyard was nondescript, not as momentous as the ceremony would lead one to believe. This has been true of my experiences in Berlin; the city draws very selective attention to its past. Much of my experience here in Berlin has led me to view the city as one caught up in forgetting- not outright silencing the past, but certainly attempting to tuck it away. A motto I have while traveling is certainly true here in Berlin: a city is understood best through what you can’t see.

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Elizabeth Cook is a Jackson School International Studies major.

Elizabeth traveled to Berlin during Summer Quarter 2011 as part of an Exploration Seminar.