Whose memory should the PM apologize to?

If you read through the entire speech you’d conclude that Turkish foreign policy has for the first time encountered absolute correctness, that all foreign policy conducted during the Republic period before the AKP was totally defective, unprincipled, imposed by outer forces and lacked initiative. There is no need to mention that this presentation is full of factual mistakes.

Erdoğan as a politician was trained by his Ex-Master Necmettin Erbakan and until the year 2000 perceived the world through the Islamist National View of Erbakan and his understanding of foreign policy to a great extent was shaped by an antagonism to the West and Israel. According to our opinion, the prime minister being able to express heavy accusations of previous administrations comes from the fact that he is just learning in the field of foreign policy. Naturally, with his egocentric personality putting himself in the middle of everything and assuming that he is the starting point of many things might support his critical perception of former policies.

In this context, we confine ourselves to mentioning only one a striking mistake in his speech. At some point in his speech he said, "Our predecessors never used to meet with someone, not in Greece, nor Bulgaria, nor Syria or Iraq or Iran, nor the northern Caucasus, nor the Turkic Republics. But they are not ashamed to still speak of successful foreign politics. Where’s the success?"

The prime minister’s words do not correspond to the truth. Even trying to prove this, considering the level of his of lack of knowledge, for a journalist it is a very distressful situation. The opening of relations with Syria started in 2000 when former Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit suggested that former President Ahmet Necdet Sezer participate in the funeral of Hafız Esad as he persistently continued politics of developing relations with the country. Have we forgotten about Turgut Özal who died of a heart attack after an exhausting Central Asia trip? The main target in foreign politics of the deceased was to make Turkey an active player in the Central Asia. Süleyman Demirel, a former Turkish president, spent an important part of his time in Middle Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. I shall mention that I perceive the prime minister’s expressions as unfortunate.

Of course, while these Turkish statesmen were trying to open up Turkey to the world, Erdoğan’s contacts, being a person in favor of the Islamist National View, were inevitably limited to mainly contacts with Gülbettin Hikmetyar, the leader of the Hizb-I Islam movement in Afghanistan.

We believe that Prime Minister Erdoğan has done injustice to the memory of Özal and Ecevit, and also to Demirel. As much as he owes an apology to them he also owes the staff of the Foreign Ministry an apology for his words.

Now let’s pass onto the second part of the speech. The prime minister calls once more for a boycott of newspapers. As you might recall, in September last year he started to attack and called for a boycott of newspapers published by the Doğan Group. But because of strong internal and external reactions he could not repeat this boycott. After four months he carried his boycott to a harder line. Erdoğan's decription of his boycott call is very problematic since he calls it a "civil initiative".

Still not at peace with freedom of the press
These words by the prime minister show once more that he still is not at peace with freedom of the press. The reason for a boycott last time was the verdict of the Deniz Feneri fraud case. This time it is understood that the prime minister is very upset about criticism directed toward his Hamas and Israel politics.

The weirdest thing is that the prime minister getting upset about the headline "Don’t stop, continue slaughtering," printed by the daily Radikal alongside a striking photo showing a bloody sacrifice of sheep during a ceremony involving the AKP in Gaziantep. What’s pathetic is, that the prime minister recently started to react not only to articles and stories but also photos. We again see a typical third world leader overrun by his autocratic tendencies, without any anger management and who lashes out at journalists because of their articles and photos.Truly, wasn’t it the same prime minister who went to Brussels last week in order to pave the way for EU relations? Which one should we believe?



Sedat Ergin is the editor-in-chief of the daily Milliyet in which this piece appeared yesterday. It was translated into English by the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review's staff