Turkey's English daily newspaper, Harriyet, reported last week that tensions were again rising over whether Turkey's press is free or not. In January of this year , the Wall Street Journal reported that Turkey's largest media group, Doran Holding's offer to sell the Harriyet, one of Turkey's oldest, most influential and profitable newspapers, was an act of surrender as the company battles multibillion tax fines.
Journalists daring to criticize state institutions or tackle taboo subjects, such as the Kurdish problem and the part played by the army in political life, are still censored, fines heavily and prosecuted without good reason.
It is common for radio and TV stations to have their broadcasts suspended for airing sensitive material.
Let’s look at some of thee sensitive areas... Once the centre of the Ottoman Empire, the modern secular republic was established in the 1920s by nationalist leader Kemal Ataturk. Straddling the continents of Europe and Asia, Turkey strategically important location has given it a major influence in the region- and control over the entrance to the Black sea.
BBC News reminds us that Turkey's progress towards democracy and a market economy was halting in the decades following the death of President Ataturk in 1938. The army saw itself as the guarantor of the constitution,and ousted governments on a number of occasions when it thought they were challenging secular values. Concern over the potential for conflict between a secular establishment backed by the military and a traditional society rooted in Islam resurfaced with the landslide election victory of the Islamist -based Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002.
Islamic Issue Abdullah Gul was chosen as president by parliament in August 2007, the first head of state with a background in political Islam. In 2001, he had founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP).He was opposed by the Turkish secularists and the military fearing he would undermine Turkey’s strict separation of state and religion.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan led the AKP party to victory in 2007 and in 2010 won resounding public approval to change the 30-year-old constitution, aimed as reducing further the power of the military and meeting the requirements for EU membership. Although the AKP has Islamist roots, he insists that it is committed to a secular state.
Turkey became an EU candidate country in 1999 and, in line with EU requirements went on to introduce substantial human rights and economic reforms. Reforms were introduced in areas of women’s rights and Kurdish culture, language, education and broadcasting.
After intense bargaining, EU membership talks were launched in October 2005. Accession negotiations are expected to take about 10 years. This past February, President Sarkosy of France visited Turkey and was criticized because of his reluctance to allow Turkey into the European Union.
The Kurdish Issue..... The Kurdish minority constitutes up to a fifth of the entire population. The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), deemed by Turkey, the U.S. and the European Union as a terrorist organization, is the best known and most radical of the Kurdish movements.
After World War I - when the victors drew the boundaries of the Middle East, they left the Kurds without a state of their own, dispersing them in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. In all these countries the Kurds were ethnic minorities. In Turkey, their expression of ethnic identity - including for some a devout adherence to Islam, rivaled the insistence of Mustafa Kemal Atatutk that the first rule of the Turkish republic be a coherent secular national identity.
Turkey is a vibrant competitive democracy with a thriving economy whose influence in its region has grown as it has moved away from its secular roots under an Islamic government. For decades the nation was one of the United States most pliable allies, a strategic border state on the edge of the Middle East that reliably followed American policy. Of late it has asserted a new approach in the region, its words and methods as likely to provoke Washington as to advance its own interests.
Turkey has long seen itself as the eastern bulwark of the NATO alliance and underlined this by having close ties with Israel, but in recent years a chill has crept into Turkish-Israeli relations and Ankara is now devoting considerable effort to cultivating better relations with Arab countries.
Turkey’s shifting foreign policy is making its Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogen, a hero to the Arab world and is openly challenging the way the United States manages its two pressing issues in the region, ran’s nuclear program and the Israeli Palestinian peace process.
A society with a multiethnic, multilingual ( Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, Armenian and Greek) empire under its belt and 80 years of experience as a constitutional republic, Turkey has managed to create its own passage to democracy, however flawed.