The Sultan and the Lord Mayor of Ankara

I am not sure if the traffic wardens also take my parking fines to the prime minister for final endorsement, but the dossier on the tax fine on the prime minister’s desk does not look like standard procedure. In the first place, this is not only unethical but also illegal.

But why did the finance ministry take the dossier to the prime minister? (a) To go ahead with it after his approval, (b) To shelve it if the prime minister thought it would be wrongly-timed, and (c) To look pretty to the Sultan for a future promotion, with the happy and pat-deprived looks of a pet cat who has just caught a bird and brought it to its master. All of the plausible explanations lead to some sort of unlawful practice. But it just happens in sultanates... It’s only that Mr. Erdogan did not see any harm in confessing what in a decent democracy could have cost him his seat. Not in Turkey...

If the prime minister behaves like a sultan why should his mayor for the capital not behave like an Ottoman governor? My first journalist-to-politician contact with Melih Gokcek, the mayor of Ankara, was through a fax message he had sent to this newspaper in mid 1990s. It was either an invitation or an unexciting press release written in poor English. I was preparing to put it into the waste basket, but suddenly started to laugh at the signature line. It read: Melih Gökçek, Lord Mayor of Ankara. Until then I did not know we had in our city a Lord Mayor like the Londoners had.

Since then Mr. Gökçek has always been the man in the news, often with his arrogance and personal wars with his opponents, if not with his scientific experiments of secretly supplying the people of Ankara water as hygienic as in Bangladesh.

Recalling how Mr. Gökçek loved to title himself in a dispatch to an English-language newspaper and the Lord Mayor of London with whom I had the pleasure to meet last week, I began to be curious about what the Turkish Lord Mayor had to tell an all-too loyal crowd of party loyalists at a rally this weekend, a gathering also honored by Mr. Erdoğan.

I was not aware that the Lord Mayor of Ankara had picked up new enemies among our colleagues. So I learned. At the public rally Mr. Gökçek promised "to make life unbearable" for Mehmet Ali Birand, a prominent journalist and a columnist for this newspaper, and Uğur Dündar, the doyen of investigative journalism in Turkey.

Mr. Dündar had to publicly declare that if in the future there is any harm on him or his family the Lord Mayor of Ankara should be held responsible. Of course, in a free country where the judiciary is independent of the government some prosecutor should either ask for Mr. Gökçek’s testimony on what he probably meant by "making life unbearable" for other people. Unfortunately, European Union candidate Turkey does not fall into that category of countries.

I did not bother myself to research whether the Lord Mayor of London has ever threatened to make life unbearable for prominent British journalists, or, if he had, would he have had any chance to keep his seat even for two more minutes. I trust my senses that such an incident could not have happened in Britain.

I shall not question either whether a big crowd of British fans would cheer him up and support his publicly-declared vendetta against two journalists at a public rally, knowing the Lord Mayor of London is an apolitical figure and does not make personal hate speeches to masses at Trafalgar Square.

Britain and Turkey are former empires. Britain is a parliamentary monarchy, and Turkey is a parliamentary democracy. Britain is an EU member, and Turkey is a member candidate. All of that’s elementary school knowledge. What else? Geographically speaking, they lie on opposite ends of the EU zone. They do trade well, and there are prospects for even more commercial cooperation. What else? One day they will be members of the same club? Definitely.

For sure, that day too will come ... when the British tax authorities take a dossier about a huge fine against an opponent media group to the prime minister’s desk for a final nod and the Lord Mayor of London publicly threatens to make life unbearable for a couple of journalists. Yes, I bet when that day comes Turkey will become a full member of the EU!