FOR the past two days, the world has been toasting UN Secretary-general Kofi Annan and his envoy Alvaro de Soto for persuading the two sides to agree on the resumption of negotiations after gruelling talks in New York.
But little has been said about the man that made it all happen, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s Prime Minister.
Whatever Turkey’s motivations, there is no doubt that, without Ankara’s decision to co-operate this week, no amount of shuttling around UN headquarters would have produced any results.
In less than a year since he took over as Prime Minister, Erdogan, 49, accomplished two things that successive Turkish government’s have been unable or unwilling to do over the past 30 years.
He took on his country’s mighty military, and managed to rein in veteran 80-year-old Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash, who went to New York like a lamb to the slaughter obediently carrying Turkey’s ‘roadmap’ for the resumption of talks and strict instructions not to mess up.
Granted, Turkey desperately wants to enter the EU and a Cyprus solution is the stumbling block to the doorway. Granted, it remains to be seen whether Ankara wants a solution or wants to be seen to want a solution; but again, it was Erdogan who was responsible for bringing about Ankara’s change of heart and making EU membership the top priority of his government.
“If Erdogan hadn’t started the ball rolling, none of this would have happened,” said Nicosia-based analyst James Ker-Lindsay yesterday.
“Where we are now has everything to do with the changes that have taken place in Turkey over the past 16 months.”
But a closer look at Erdogan’s career shows his stance on Cyprus is just one element in a broader metamorphosis that has taken him from fairly radical Islamic views to increasingly pro-western policies.
It was only in 1999 that the Mayor of Istanbul was jailed for four months for reading the following poem: “Minarets are our bayonets, domes are our helmets, mosques are our barracks, believers are our soldiers.”
As he walked into prison, Erdogan quoted a Turkish saying: “The song doesn’t end here.”
Two years ago to the day, shortly after the founding of his now-ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Erdogan described the government’s efforts to reduce the birth rate by promoting the use of contraception as “treason”.
“To recommend to people not to procreate is straight out treason to the state,” Erdogan told a crowd gathered to celebrate the opening of an AKP office in Istanbul.
“It’s a means of wanting to erase the history and the surface of the land,” Anatolia news agency quoted him as saying.
“Have babies,” he told the crowd. “Allah wants it.”
Erdogan was born in Istanbul to a working class family and attended an Islamic school. To earn pocket money, he sold sweets at football games and became involved in the youth branch of the National Salvation Party, a pro-Islamic party that opposed Turkey’s entry into the EU.
Some years later, he became leader of the youth branch of the party and was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994.
As mayor, Erdogan angered secularists by banning alcohol in cafes, but no one could deny that he did a good job of running the city. He launched numerous social programmes for the poor, such as providing pencils for schools, running charities and providing free ambulances for pregnant women.
He also restored the city to its former cultural glory, but the military saw him as nothing but a threat, even going to far as to declare a thousand-year war on him over disparaging comments he made in 1992.
He later retracted, but did say that by interfering in politics, the army was “casting deep shadows on democracy”.
“There is no institution that is beyond accountability, and no institution should be seen as possessing the absolute truth, for there is no such thing in a democracy. In a democracy, there is discussion and compromise,” he said.
Erdogan led the AKP to victory in a landslide win in November 2002, but was not himself appointed Prime Minister until March 2003 because of his 1999 conviction. AKP won the elections due to Erdogan’s perceived honesty and dynamism, which gave him the edge over his rivals. He was seen as the only hope to stamp out rampant political corruption.
But since coming to power, he has toned down his Islamic rhetoric and is now seen as s charismatic and energetic leader, who welcomes change. Unlike other Turkish politicians who appear stiff and formal, Erdogan is seen as relaxed and is known to the Turkish people as ‘Prime Minister Tayyip’.
Washington-based Turkish correspondent, Ugur Akinci, who tracked Erdogan’s recent trip to the US, described the Turkish leader as “a man with a mission, racing against time on multiple fronts”.
“Since 1989, during my career as a journalist and a writer in Washington, I have seen quite a few Turkish Prime Ministers pass from the nation’s capital,” said Akinci.
“Recep Tayyip Erdogan is arguably the most confident and self-assured of them all. Erdogan struck me as a man who believes one hundred per cent in what he says.”
Despite his new-found European stance, many in Turkey are still unsure where Erdogan’s heart really lies.
“This is the big debate in Turkey,” said Ker-Lindsay. “What does Erdogan stand for? We’ve seen this in many ways in his handling of Cyprus. One day he would say one thing and the next day he would say something totally contradictory over Cyprus, so nobody has ever really had much of a feel for what he really stands for. There is a lot of that as well in his domestic policy.”
Ker-Lindsay said he had spoken with many western journalists working in Turkey, who said that Erdogan had never wanted anything to do with them until the day he was prosecuted and realised the attention he could get from the western media.
“A lot of people are very sceptical of what the AKP stands for; they believe he has seen an opportunity by pushing forward Turkey’s EU membership, so that he can open up society enough to allow a greater religious freedom to exist in the country.
“This is probably to a great extent what lies at the heart of his agenda,” he added.
But what is remarkable is the way that Erdogan has managed to get support for this from the military and the Foreign Ministry, making them realise the army would need to step back if Turkey wanted to join the EU, and that if Turkey had any hope of that it needed to solve the Cyprus problem.
“He is genuine that he wants to solve Cyprus,” the analyst said.
“It may not necessarily be for the best possible reasons and I don’t think he is particularly interested in the details of Cyprus.
“If you take a more sceptical view, what’s 180,000 people when you are dealing with 60 million in Turkey?
“But everyone has their own agenda: it’s the outcome that matters. What we have seen is that after 30 years of effort there is finally a government in Turkey which has had the wherewithal to be able to push ahead with reaching a settlement and has done so very cleverly and at an opportune time.”
