Turkey

Erdogan’s game: why Turkey has turned against the West

Six years ago, at the celebratory opening match of the new Basaksehir Stadium in Istanbul, an unlikely football star emerged. The red team’s ageing, six-foot tall centre-forward lumbered toward the white team’s goal; a delicate chip over the advancing keeper brought a goal that sent the stadium into ecstasy. The scorer was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was the run-up to an election in which he expected to become his country’s 12th president. For Erdogan, a former semi-professional footballer, it was brilliant self-promotion. Like Fidel Castro’s baseball pitching or Chairman Mao’s ‘world record’ Yangtze River swim at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Erdogan’s contrived sporting prowess helped make

Med alert: Greece and Turkey are in a battle for hegemony

No one should fool themselves about the nature of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s vision for Turkey. It’s an imperialist project that would see Turkey’s hegemony stretch from the Mediterranean Sea and Libya all the way to Iran. Erdogan’s plans for his country’s expansion are evident in the current stand-off in the eastern Mediterranean between Turkey and Greece. Turkish frigates are accompanying a research vessel, the Oruc Reis, as it enters disputed waters to carry out a seismic survey in search of natural gas. In its path lies a joint force of Greek and French warships, attempting to prevent the Turkish from venturing further. The two sides have almost come to blows

There is no justification for turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque

It is official: Hagia Sophia, for a thousand years the world’s largest cathedral, and since 1934 a museum, is to be turned back into a mosque. Ever since I heard of the possibility, I have been praying it would not be so because of the impact it will have on Muslim-Christian relations in Turkey, the Middle East and beyond. A suitably purged and compliant judiciary, however, has bowed to the wishes of the authoritarian President Erdogan that Turkey should become more Islamic and less secular. There has been a church on the site since 360 ad and the present building dates from the reign of Justinian in the mid-sixth century.

The way Greece has conducted itself in this pandemic is an example to us all

Aristophanes was a comic genius long before the Marx Brothers, but he also gave good advice to the Athenians: stop the war! In his play Lysistrata he had the women going on strike — no more nookie — until the men stopped fighting. During the plague that killed the greatest Athenian of them all, Pericles, Aristophanes advised the young to isolate, meditate and masturbate, advice still valid to this day. Greece, with roughly the same population as Switzerland and faced with a surge of migrants turned loose by the dreaded Turks, has handled the crisis well. The American media is using the virus crisis in order to attack Trump, but

Riveting and beautifully staged analysis of totalitarianism: Arcola’s #WeAreArrested reviewed

When the RSC does modern drama it usually lays on an ultra-worthy yarn with a huge cast, dozens of fancy costumes and a three-hour running time. Miraculously, its new co-production with the Arcola avoids these faults and delivers a terse, gripping 75-minute documentary drama based on the prison diary of Turkish journalist, Can Dundar. In 2015 Dundar received proof that his country’s intelligence service was attempting to supply arms to Syrian rebels. He knew that if he released the material he might face jail but he published it anyway and was threatened with life imprisonment. Peter Hamilton Dyer, well known for impersonating journalists, plays Dundar as a loveably cerebral type

Portrait of the week: Brexit uncertainty, Turkey in Syria and a Chinese threat

Home Brexit teetered from uncertainty to uncertainty. Parliament had been summoned to sit on Saturday 19 October to debate what Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, had brought back from a European Union summit. He had held talks before the week began with Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach of Ireland, at Thornton Manor in the Wirral, from which optimistic noises emerged. Margaret Atwood, 79, from Ottawa, and Bernardine Evaristo, 60, from Eltham, shared the Booker Prize. The Queen wore the George IV diadem at the State Opening of Parliament instead of the heavy Imperial State Crown. Among 26 Bills set out in the Queen’s Speech were seven relating to Brexit, one of

Pax Russica: as Trump abandons Syria’s Kurds, Russia is ready to expand its empire

While American troops were hurriedly leaving north-eastern Syria, a young female Kurdish politician called Hervin Khalaf was pulled from her car and executed by the side of the road. Actually, the Kurdish media said she was raped and then stoned to death. They blamed one of the Arab militias being used by Turkey in its invasion. A grim video posted online shows a man holding a Kalashnikov nudging her body with the tip of his boot, as you would a dead animal. The video has not been authenticated and the militia accused of doing this says it was miles away at the time. But in Khalaf the Syrian Kurds have

The sea, the sea

Walking into Fingal’s Cave, after scrambling across the rocks to reach it from the landing stage where the boat from Mull arrives, is a strangely emotional experience. It’s not just the extraordinary landscape, the precise, almost unnatural shaping of the hexagonal basalt columns that rise up high above you, the screeching of gulls and roaring of the sea as it enters and leaves the cave. That’s enough to provoke a sense of wonder. But there’s also so much history attached to the place since it was discovered by the Romantics and became the epitome of the sentimental landscape, awesome in scale, and also quite frightening. Mendelssohn, Walter Scott and Turner

Istanbul Notebook

‘It’s official. Turkey is a banana republic!’ My friend Mustapha, a serial entrepreneur, sends me a flurry of doom-laden WhatsApp messages on hearing the news that Istanbul’s mayoral election is being re-run. One of them is a cartoon of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan standing in front of the national flag, crescent turned into a banana. In March, his ruling AKP lost Istanbul, the engine of what remains of the Turkish economy, together with Izmir and Ankara. It was a historic breakthrough for the opposition CHP and its victorious mayoral candidate Ekrem Imamoglu. But it was also a massive threat to Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, who hasn’t lost an

Rebuilding Artemis’s temple

As soon as the blaze that nearly brought down Notre Dame was extinguished, two questions were asked: how did it catch fire? And how will it be rebuilt? So too with a famous Greek temple. In 560 bc in Ephesus on the west coast of modern Turkey was built a massive temple to Artemis (Roman Diana), the largest building we know of from the Greek world and the first to be constructed out of marble. It was sponsored by Croesus, king of Lydia, a man so rich you could commit suicide by jumping off his wallet. But it was intentionally burned down in 356 bc by a man called Herostratus,

My least favourite countries in the world

Every year during Easter Week I draw up a chart of my least favourite countries and distribute the list to close friends and relatives. I’ve been doing this for thirty years now and I’m sure it has proved helpful to those close to me. So sure, in fact, that I intend, from now on, to post the same chart here. I hope in time my hate list will come to be seen as a familiar herald of summer, like letters to the Times about the first cuckoo or Christian names given to children. I never explain my reasoning: in most cases there is no need. And where there is need

Stone walls do not a prison make

There’s no getting away from that title. I will never see the world again. It catches your eye on the bookshelf. I will never see the world again. It’s there, at the top of every page. I Will Never See the World Again. It’s a killer opening, before the book has even begun, and it’s all true. Ahmet Altan, one of Turkey’s leading writers, in 2016 was arrested on charges of providing subliminal messages to coup supporters, and has since been sentenced to life imprisonment: Never again would I be able to kiss the woman I love, embrace my kids, meet with my friends, walk the streets. I would not

My Christmas nightmares

Christmas in our family seems to guarantee tears and tantrums as well as jingle bells and jollity. Indeed, in my childhood, ‘feeling Christmassy’ meant feeling thoroughly overwrought or bad tempered, the antithesis of the ‘Christmas Spirit’. I think my father invented it when my mother, who was a terrible cook, spent all day making marmalade to give as Christmas presents and was then beside herself with anger when she burnt the lot. My earliest Christmas disaster was my first attempt at cake icing. I’d proudly come home from school with a Christmas cake. It was covered with smooth royal icing on which I’d painted the Three Kings — but I’d

Why Erdogan is relishing making life difficult for Saudi’s crown prince

Jamal Khashoggi’s murder has been dissected by the world’s press, perhaps none more so than in Turkey, where the journalist met his grisly fate. Fresh information is still being leaked about his final moments inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. In a recording of his murder, Khashoggi can be heard putting up a fight. He orders his killers to release him and warns they’ll be brought to account. But will they? Or are there bigger fish to fry? And what is Erdogan hoping to achieve by making life uncomfortable for Saudi’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. Khashoggi has been described by some as a Saudi dissident. Turkish media say he

Blood Brotherhood

 Istanbul In another time, in another place, we might never have known about the death of Jamal Khashoggi. In a Saudi consulate, the staff are guaranteed to say nothing. The reason we know so much is that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey, has been willing to tell the world not just what he knows, but what he suspects. It has been clear from the offset that this isn’t just about the death of a journalist but a battle for political leadership of the Islamic world. On Tuesday, in his first full statement on Khashoggi’s killing, Erdogan said that the perpetrators should stand trial in Turkey, and that everyone

Let’s talk about how the Turkish government deals with dissidents abroad

The indignation over the disappearance of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has taken an interesting turn now that Donald Trump has promised to inflict ‘severe punishment’ on the Saudi government should it turn out that he was in fact tortured and killed in the Saudi embassy in Ankara – though not obviously to the point of cancelling US military contracts with the kingdom. And the indignation is entirely justified. For agents of a foreign state to infringe the human rights of its subjects in another country is a calculated insult to the country in question quite apart from the unpleasantness of exhibiting abroad the behaviour visited on critics at home.

The Mesut Özil affair is an own goal for Erdogan’s critics

The morning after Mesut Özil’s shock resignation from the German national football team, his family’s ancestral home set to work. Enlisting the help of the local fire brigade, locals in Devrek, a small village near Turkey’s Black Sea coast, removed the large board at its entrance of the star midfielder in his Germany kit. The picture chosen as its replacement was a giant version of the image that first caused the furore – a photograph of Özil shaking hands with president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The response of this small village was far from unique in Turkey. Özil’s resignation has played out very differently here to how it has in Germany.

Erdogan, Trump and other fragile egos: Theresa May’s unenviable foreign policy dilemmas

Given the way her Cabinet ministers are behaving at the moment, Theresa May is really rather used to dealing with fragile egos. This will come in handy over the next month when the Prime Minister has to go from what promises to be an extremely tricky Nato summit straight into Donald Trump’s visit to the UK. As James says in his politics column this week, the challenges of these events, along with the ongoing problems both in the Cabinet and Parliament over Brexit, will make July one of the hardest months of May’s premiership to date. But trying to tell her warring ministers to shut up seems easy compared to

Erdogan’s victory means Turkey’s future is far from certain

Many people I know woke up yesterday morning with a knot in their stomachs. ‘Another five years,’ I heard one person mutter. They were referring of course to the victory secured by President Erdogan in Turkey. He won nearly 53 per cent of the votes in an election that many had hoped would see him defeated, especially as his regular ‘Ace’ card, the economy, has been rather rocky these past few years. The result showed his main rival wasn’t even close: Muharrem Ince garnered a little shy of 31 per cent in the poll. The 64-year-old president thanked the country for putting their faith in him once again. He told

How Europe’s Turks could sweep Erdogan to victory

President Erdogan can raise a crowd. As he travels to every corner of his huge country in the month before elections that could return him to the palace for another five years, tens of thousands turn out in sports halls, city squares and purpose-built rally grounds. His acerbic, bombastic public appearances, stage-managed with rock-star entrances and booming music, have become a hallmark of his brand of polished populism. The 15,000-strong crowd who gathered in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo earlier this month might have been smaller than Erdogan is now used to, but their dedication made up for their numbers. Most had come from Western Europe, Turks from Germany, the Netherlands