Ankara's Proxy

Michael Weiss
www.standpointmag.co.uk
July/August '10

At the heart of Israel's deadly raid of the Mavi Marmara on May 31 is the Turkish charity Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (I.H.H.), the "Free Gaza" flotilla's lead organiser. But the extent to which I.H.H. has been enabled and underwritten by the Turkish government has been increasingly scrutinized by international observers over the past several months and for good reason. In the aftermath of the violent showdown on the high seas, which left nine Turkish passengers dead and a number of Israeli commandos critically injured, Turkey's parliament passed a resolution to "reconsider economic and military relations" with the Jewish state, a decades-long ally. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, returning to Istanbul after an emergency meeting with Hillary Clinton, blamed Israel alone for the confrontation and accused it of committing a "crime against humanity." But the most incendiery rhetoric came from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself.

Recent months have seen a weakening of the once assured Israeli-Turkish relationship almost to the point of dissolution and in the aftermath of the Mavi Marmara clash, Erdogan has not only depicted Israel as an anathema, worse than "bullies and pirates," but also full-throatedly endorsed its main clerical enemy in the Levant. "Hamas are resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land," he told an ecstatic anti-Israel rally a few weeks ago in the Turkish city of Konya. "They have won an election. I have told this to US officials... I do not accept Hamas as a terrorist organization. I think the same today. They are defending their land."



Most of Turkey's independent political class see domestic and international calculation behind this bluster, a way for Erdogan to shore up Islamist credibility in advance of an upcoming election and reposition Ankara as a renascent power broker in the Middle East - Iran's chief competiton for that role. One writer for the Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet observed that, it's "almost as if [Erodgan] was waiting for a new crisis with Israel to be able to work the streets in order to regain some of the political ground his ruling Justice and Development Party has been loosing over bread and butter issues at home."

But this raises the fundamental question of why a country that is both an ally of the United States and Nato as well as an aspiring member of the European Union would brazenly declare its solidarity with a terrorist group outlawed by both. The answer lies in the increasingly Islamist nature of Erodgan's regime as well as the complicated relationship his party AKP has enjoyed with I.H.H., a suddenly infamous non-governmental organisation that acts more like a governmental one. Its evolution has been from a rogue and highly suspect charity into the advance guard of a new Turkish foreign policy.

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