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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 7/29/13

Turkey: Unrest's Currents Run Deep

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But there is trouble on the horizon for the economy. The growth rate has dropped, and, while the AKP has overseen a dramatic rise in living standards over the past decade, the economy has cooled, income is stagnant, and the demonstrations have spooked the stock market and foreign investors. The stock market plunged 10.47 percent on June 3, and, as Tim Ash of Standard Bank told the Financial Times, "Simply put on a risk-rewards basis, Turkey does not appear to offer convincing values at present, and investors would be well advised to adopt a cautious approach."

Even a peace agreement with the Kurds appears to be in danger.

According to the Guardian (UK), Ankara has flooded the Kurdish region with security forces, military camps, and checkpoints, in an effort to shut down one of the area's major economic activities: smuggling.

But after 30 years of war and some 40,000 deaths, the region's economy is in ruins, and smuggling is sometimes the only economic activity left to the Kurds. "People here feel they are under siege," Nazif Ataman, a Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party member told the Guardian. "The military controls are reminiscent of war. We lack everything here: schools, hospitals, factories. Peace has come, but the government only invests in security."

And, under pressure from Turkish nationalists, Erdogan has refused to consider two core Kurdish demands: that the Kurds be allowed to use their own language for education, and that the 10 percent threshold for entering parliament be reduced. Kurds make up about 10 percent of Turkey's population and are concentrated mostly in the country's east

At the very time that Kurds in Iraq and Syria are increasingly autonomous from their central governments, the Turkish government is cracking down. On July 19, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) gave the Turkish government a "final warning" to "act quickly" and take "concrete and practical steps" to reach a peace agreement.

Lastly, the AKP's support for the insurgency against the Assad regime in Syria is increasingly unpopular among Turks. The AKP pushed its Egyptian counterpart to back the insurgency, which in part led to the recent coup in Cairo. It was Morsi's call for a jihad against Damascus that helped propel the Egyptian Army's move against the Brotherhood government. Egypt's new foreign minister has already distanced Egypt from Morsi's all-out support for overthrowing Assad. Will the Muslim Brotherhood's fall in Egypt reverberate in Turkey? It might.

In the meantime, anti-AKP activists are continuing their campaign, one in which ridicule of Erdogan -- he has a thin skin -- has emerged as a tactic. Thus the "Alcoholic Unity League" (more than 80 percent of Turks do not drink) has joined with the "Looters Solidarity Front (Erdogan referred to demonstrators as "looters"). Despite water cannons, rubber bullets, and gas, the Turks have kept a sense of humor.

But issues that fueled the May and June protests are hardly a laughing matter, and they are not about to quietly disappear.

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Conn M. Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus, à ‚¬Å"A Think Tank Without Walls, and an independent journalist. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. He (more...)
 
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