Apology, Cyprus hinder Israel’s Turkey gas bid

Πηγή: Hurriet Daily News
Jan 25 2013

The 2010 Gaza crisis drove a wedge between Turkey and Israel, but tensions over Israel’s energy links with Greek Cyprus could also divide the two.

The normalization of Turkish-Israeli relations – which is contingent on the latter apologizing and paying compensation over the deadly 2010 Gaza raid – would not be enough to effect energy cooperation between the two due to Israel’s energy cooperation with Greek Cyprus, according to a Turkish official.

The revelation emerged yesterday during the 16th Eurasian Economic Summit in Istanbul in which Michael Lotem, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s special envoy for energy, attempted to approach Akkan Suver, the head of conference organizer the Marmara Group (MG) Foundation, with a request to discuss possible energy cooperation with Deputy Turkish Energy Minister Murat Mercan.

But according to sources speaking on condition of anonymity, Mercan refused to speak because Turkey had downgraded its diplomatic relations with Israel to a minimum because Israel had killed nine Turks on board the Mavi Marmara aid flotilla, which was trying to break the Israeli blockade on Gaza in 2010.

Mercan, however, later agreed to speak informally at a coffee break following the conference’s “Natural gas as the game changer” session. Replying to Lotem’s questions as to the possibility exporting Mediterranean gas via Turkey, Mercan replied that even if Israel fulfilled Turkish demands for getting relations back on track, namely, providing an open apology for the Mavi Marmara killings, compensating the families of the victims and ending the blockade on Gaza, the problem of Israel’s resource cooperation with Greek Cyprus would still remain.

Turkey could be a natural energy cooperation partner for Israel because potential gas finds off Israel’s shore could find a market in Turkey and Europe. Before the Gaza crisis, Turkey and Israel had been in detailed talks for regional energy cooperation, including constructing pipelines between them through the Mediterranean.

The problems related to Greek Cyprus stem from 2012, when Nicosia declared parts of the Mediterranean as its economic zone for oil and gas exploration and extraction, including territorial waters claimed by the Turkish Cypriot government. The declaration prompted the Turkish government to announce that it would not do business with any country or company that entered into a Greek Cypriot ventures.

Other sources speaking on condition of anonymity, however, said the exchange was not a negative one since it clarified Turkey’s position, indicating which parties companies intent on investing in Israeli projects should not cooperate with while providing guidance to Israeli political parties, which are set to begin coalition talks following Jan. 22 elections.

Mercan used to be the head of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Turkish Parliament for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and was an active member of the Turkish-Israeli Friendship Group in Parliament until he resigned in protest at Israeli operations against Palestinian civilians in Gaza in 2008.

ERDOĞAN'S DECADE

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with Turkish military officers, Ankara, July 29, 2011

Πηγή: The Cairo Review
By Hugh Pope
March 26 2012

The swirling currents of daily political life in Turkey enjoy a wild unpredictability. But in November 2002, when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP) swept to power with surprising strength, it turned out that it was riding one of Turkey’s regular underlying tides. This sudden popular reversal was much the same as in 1950 when a similar surge of votes brought Adnan Menderes and the Democrat Party to power. And it happened again in 1983 in favor of Turgut Özal and the Motherland Party. On each of these three occasions, the new leader catching the public imagination was charismatic, pragmatic, and able to gather round him a coalition of interests including conservative landowners, progressive businessmen, Turkish nationalists, Kurds, the pious, a scattering of liberals, and a bedrock of skepticism about Turkey’s secularist ideology and its military enforcers. The stars of Menderes and Özal both faded after ten years, during which time they became more autocratic and began to rely on an ever-narrowing circle of advisers. Erdoğan, perhaps the most effective leader of them all, reaches his tenth anniversary in November.



It was not immediately obvious that Erdoğan would emerge as such a national leader. A graduate of an imam and preacher-training school, he had risen through the youth wing of the implicitly pro-Islamist and usually marginal movement led by veteran politician Necmettin Erbakan. Erdoğan’s opportunity arrived in 1994, when divisions in Turkey’s political system and his own campaigning energy secured him the mayor’s seat in Istanbul, Turkey’s cultural and commercial capital, with just one quarter of the vote. His split with the Erbakan movement came in 2001, when he and the movement’s pragmatic wing realized they needed mass appeal if they were ever to win national elections. And in 2002, Erdoğan benefited from a general sense of popular fatigue with squabbling old-school politicians in a country still reeling from a major economic crisis. Add to the mix the fact that he and his party offered something plausible and new, and Erdoğan enjoyed a similar confluence of circumstances that had allowed newcomers Menderes and Özal their surprise victories in 1950 and 1983.

The jury is still out on the achievements of the AKP’s first decade. Great successes marked the early years—waves of reforms, the opening of EU accession negotiations, the end of torture in jails, strong economic expansion, and more improvements for ethnic Kurds than any previous government. But the AKP has fumbled important policies, often following failures of its own political will. Cyprus remains unsolved; a great wedge between Turkey and the EU. The Armenian genocide question, at one time at the gate of a path to resolution, is once again an arena of growing friction. And the Kurdish problem, in the process of being resolved in 2009, has fallen back into armed conflict. Domestic critics see the similar corrosive effects of absolute power on the AKP, with thousands of Turks being detained and hundreds held for years on controversial grounds of “terrorism.” These are mostly Turkish Kurd activists, but also include nationalists, soldiers, university students, academics, and journalists.

As with the Menderes and Özal parties before it, the fate of the AKP is above all linked to Prime Minister Erdoğan. Some people say they voted for the tall, broad-shouldered ex-mayor just because of the confident swagger in his stride; others saw him as a scary product of his former pro-Islamic party. There was radical fire enough in a poem read out by Erdoğan in 1997 to cost him his job as Istanbul mayor and provoke a temporary ban from politics: ‘The mosques are our barracks, / The domes our helmets, / The minarets our bayonets, / And the believers our soldiers.’ But the poem was actually written by Turkish nationalist panegyrist Ziya Gökalp (who died in 1924) and Erdoğan’s ability to win 34 percent of the vote in 2002 proved that ordinary Turks had accepted Erdoğan as a solid manager of Istanbul, not as a scary fundamentalist.

Indeed, during the campaign, Erdoğan told visitors to the AKP’s headquarters that he simply wanted to be known as a conservative and explicitly stated that he had broken with his radical Islamist past. “That period is over, finished,” he said, in his sometimes brusque style. “We have opened a new page with a new group of people, a brand new party . . . we were anti-European. Now we’re pro-European.” When challenged over past statements such as “my reference is Islam,” however, Erdoğan retained an element of the old ambivalence of the Islamist underground. “Islam is a religion; democracy is a way of ruling. You can’t compare the two. We just want to increase the happiness of the people,” he said. Secularists remained nervous that a new, Islamist ideology would take the place of their own. None missed an opportunity to recall that Erdoğan had once cynically compared democracy to “catching a train. When you get to your station, you get off.”