The Independent: Erdogan is acting more and more like an autocrat

PanARMENIAN.Net - Turkey has been one of the world's great political and economic success stories of the last decade, an article in The Independent reads.

“Over 70 million people under quasi-military rule of great brutality for 80 years appeared at last to be coming under civilian control. Torture stopped in the prisons. Elections not army coups d'état – four in Turkey since 1960 – determined who held power in Ankara. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, first elected in 2002, was just the sort of moderate, democratic pro-capitalist Islamic party that the West wanted to encourage. The foreign media boosted Turkey uncritically last year as a model for the Arab world as police states started tumbling,” Patrick Cockburn says in an opinion he titled “Tiger Turkey at the crossroads.”

“There is more substance to the Turkish "miracle" than there was to most of the over-hyped booms in Europe, from Ireland to Greece. Political and economic changes here were real. The AKP outmanoeuvred the military leadership and its powerful allies in the state bureaucracy and appeared to break their long tutelage. In 2001 the economy had been a barely floating wreck as inflation touched 80 per cent a year and the Turkish lira halved in value. Banks closed and tens of thousands of enterprises went bankrupt. All these disasters became a distant memory as Turkey acquired a "tiger" economy. In a decade Turkey's GDP and exports both doubled in value. Small and medium-sized manufacturers became energetic exporters. Foreign investment, the key to growth in Turkey, poured in and the economy became the 15th largest in the world. It is these gains that are now under threat. Political reforms stalled two years ago. One foreign observer says "Erdogan decided not to use his political capital to resolve the conflict with the Kurds, the dispute over Cyprus and relations with Armenia". Overconfidence in Turkey's new-found strength diverted attention from crucial questions, the most important of which is bringing an end to the Kurdish insurgency. Some Turkish liberals suspect that, after being in power for almost a decade, the AKP has found it convenient to adopt the mechanisms of repression used by its predecessors,” he says.

“The clamp down has been severe. This month Reporters Without Borders (RSF) demoted Turkey to 148th place out of 178 countries in its annual World Press Freedom Index. Its report said: "The judicial system launched a wave of arrests on journalists without precedent since the military dictatorship." Some 99 journalists are in jail, about 60 per cent of whom are Kurdish. "It is a sort of political cleansing by the judiciary and the police," says Erol Onderoglu, the RSF representative for Turkey,” Cockburn says.

“Often journalists are held for more than a year without knowing the charges against them, and an editor can be jailed for any article appearing in his paper critical of government policy. In one case a Kurdish editor was sentenced to 166 years in prison, later reduced to 20 years by the High Court, for such a piece. Osman Kovala of Anadolu Kultur, a human rights organization in Istanbul, says there is "still no clear distinction between expression of an opinion and membership of a terrorist organization". In 2007 the murder of the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was widely believed to be their work and became a cause célèbre. Shot in the back by a 17-year-old student, his murder had all the marks of a well-organized plot. But, in January, a court in Istanbul appalled a broad swathe of Turkish opinion by finding the gunman had largely acted alone,” he says

As to PM Erdogan, Cockburn describes his as “a pious, populist nationalist of great political skill, who is sounding and acting more and more like an autocrat.”