Pardon our crankiness, welcome to Turkey
Güncelleme Tarihi:
Oluşturulma Tarihi: Nisan 06, 2009 00:00
Well, what can we say? Welcome President Obama and your entourage too. Same for all those coming to the Alliance of Civilizations summit. Just another day in something less than paradise. We do appreciate the attention. But just a few reflections from where we sit, if you don’t mind.
We stumbled into the weekend after a combative local election, including scores of injuries and a fatality. As of Saturday the nation’s fifth largest city was still tied up in the knots of ballot fraud allegations and no legally declared mayoral winner. Among other things occupying us in this busy week was a funeral for a national party leader who perished in a helicopter crash along with the crew days before the vote, along with a colleague who phoned for help until his mobile phone went dead in the freezing weather.
We all went to bed Saturday night trying to figure out the score in the Rasmussen-for-NATO-sinecure brokering that looked more like deal making at the covered bazaar. Those images of the Italian prime minister wandering in the garden with a phone glued to his ear while Obama and Germany’s Angela Merkel lingered in the backdrop as the deal was cut remain priceless footage of statesmanship in the real world. It looks like Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan got the better part of the deal: No. 2 job in NATO for a Turk, final say in Afghanistan, applause for the Organization of the Islamic Conference, closure of the hated Roj TV in Denmark and the promise that Rasmussen will today in Istanbul bow in fealty. He must have really wanted to be NATO secretary general to accept such humiliation.
Just as we were getting our brains wrapped around this high stakes political wheeling and dealing, we wake up Sunday morning to find that Azerbaijani President İlham Aliyev is now pouting over Turkey’s efforts at reconciliation with his archrival Armenia. Open the border before we resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute and kiss my gas goodbye, Aliyev seems to be saying. We have more than a little empathy with the fact the Armenia is sitting on something approaching 20 percent of Azerbaijan territory. But we also find Aliyev’s antics well, a little silly.
Meanwhile, some of us at the Daily News went out for breakfast Sunday morning to think about all this. But we couldn’t get home because road closures in Istanbul and Ankara began before noon in the face of so many heavyweights coming to town. Not again, moan 12 million people. One suggestion floating around the newsroom Sunday afternoon involves the prison island Yassıada, just off the coast of Istanbul. It’s abandoned and available. How about making it an international conference facility? Great views. Great security. Easy access to the airport. Helipad. And we can get on with our lives.
Pardon our crankiness. Welcome to Turkey.
We all went to bed Saturday night trying to figure out the score in the Rasmussen-for-NATO-sinecure brokering that looked more like deal making at the covered bazaar. Those images of the Italian prime minister wandering in the garden with a phone glued to his ear while Obama and Germany’s Angela Merkel lingered in the backdrop as the deal was cut remain priceless footage of statesmanship in the real world. It looks like Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan got the better part of the deal: No. 2 job in NATO for a Turk, final say in Afghanistan, applause for the Organization of the Islamic Conference, closure of the hated Roj TV in Denmark and the promise that Rasmussen will today in Istanbul bow in fealty. He must have really wanted to be NATO secretary general to accept such humiliation.
Just as we were getting our brains wrapped around this high stakes political wheeling and dealing, we wake up Sunday morning to find that Azerbaijani President İlham Aliyev is now pouting over Turkey’s efforts at reconciliation with his archrival Armenia. Open the border before we resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute and kiss my gas goodbye, Aliyev seems to be saying. We have more than a little empathy with the fact the Armenia is sitting on something approaching 20 percent of Azerbaijan territory. But we also find Aliyev’s antics well, a little silly.
Meanwhile, some of us at the Daily News went out for breakfast Sunday morning to think about all this. But we couldn’t get home because road closures in Istanbul and Ankara began before noon in the face of so many heavyweights coming to town. Not again, moan 12 million people. One suggestion floating around the newsroom Sunday afternoon involves the prison island Yassıada, just off the coast of Istanbul. It’s abandoned and available. How about making it an international conference facility? Great views. Great security. Easy access to the airport. Helipad. And we can get on with our lives.
Pardon our crankiness. Welcome to Turkey.