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INSIGHT
INSIGHT
Aired November 4, 2002 - 17:00:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JONATHAN MANN, CNN ANCHOR: Whacked. Turkish voters flex their muscles, reject established parties, and turn to Islamists. secular Turks and Western allies will be sweating it out.
Hello and welcome to a special edition of INSIGHT from Ankara.
Choose your favorite political clich‚s and have them all translated into Turkish. It wasn't quite an earthquake or a landslide here when voters went to the polls, but they did take a country that was established on defiantly secular lines and turn it towards a political party with such close ties to Islam that it's almost illegal.
Not only that, but only one other political party even made it into Turkey's parliament.
On this special edition of INSIGHT from Ankara: Turkey, it's election, ad clean sweep.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
(voice-over): Yezi Epay (ph) is a regular at one of Ankara's oldest Turkish baths. He is an educated merchant, but he's steamed.
"Our people can't find bread," he told us, "and rich people don't have a clue what bread costs. Honestly, I tell you, Turkey is in very serious condition."
So as Epay (ph) was rubbed and wrestled, he took some satisfaction I the election victory of an Islamist party that promises change.
"They'll have to make good use of the opportunity they've been given," he said. "If not, they'll have the same defeat the Kurds government has had."
That defeat was total. From the very first moments, election results were released it was clear that the Islamists Justice and Development Party had a big lead built on anger at government corruption and mismanagement.
"The three parties in the government had disappointing results," this man told us. "This is the people's reaction. People are reacting to illegal dealings and sleaze, and I think it's a normal reaction."
"And if the Justice and Development Party is not successful, they'll face the people's punishment too."
Secular Turkey finds itself in an unprecedented situation. Islamists have been in government before, but not with a majority that would allow them to govern alone. They have one now, after a campaign focused on good government and reform, not religion.
And the Islamist leader immediately tried to reassure a nervous nation, the West and the world.
"As soon as possible," he said, "we have to get in touch with the leading and opposition parties of the European Union, in order to start building bridges."
(END VIDEOTAPE)
But getting his party elected and establishing new alliances may be the easy part for Tayyip Erdogan. He has some very big other challenges still ahead.
CNN's Walter Rodgers has a look at that.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
WALTER RODGERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Having successfully wooed Turkish voters, Tayyip Erdogan has now set about courting his skeptics in Europe and America, who feared he might try to convert Turkey into a conservative Islamist country.
He called this news conference and reassured international journalists that his own Islamist past is behind him.
"From here on," he said, "we will work to expedite Turkey's integration into the European Union, and into the world."
As his partisans reveled in what amounted to a political revolution in Turkey, the leader of the now dominant AK party has moved quietly behind the scenes to signal he is no threat to anybody here.
In Turkey, the military is widely perceived to be the institution that keeps the country from veering off on political extremes. And again, they are overseeing events to guarantee Erdogan's conversion to tolerance and democracy as genuine.
AMMERIN ZAMAN, "THE ECONOMIST": I think that the army, for now, will be sitting back and watching very, very closely. And if indeed our party deviates in any way from Turkey's pro-secular, pro-Western course, the army will make its displeasure known.
RODGERS: The last time an Islamist government came to power, 1997, the army nudged them aside and told Turkey's politicians to get back on a democratic track. But it is Turkey's failed economy, not the generals, which represents the greatest threat to a new government here.
10 percent of the people in this country do not get a monthly paycheck. As many as 30 percent of Turks are without work.
Fixing Turkey's economy has been harder than pulling teeth, pain stemming from a collapsed economy is what swept Tayyip Erdogan's party into office, and if they can't fix things, they may be shuffling off the same way.
Sunday's polling was probably as much a public protest over the failures of the older politicians as a vote of confidence in Erdogan or his Islamist cohorts.
SEDAT ERGIN "HUMMIVEY": He can succeed. I mean, when he was the mayor of Istanbul, he showed that he was a doer, that he was capable, but running a country is something different.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
RODGERS (on camera): Tayyip Erdogan has no experience running anything the size of Turkey, let alone something with the problems that Turkey has.
His approach so far merely seems to be trying to be all things to all people -- John.
MANN: He has to solve those problems, though. The economic problems are enormous. How much flexibility does he have?
RODGERS: He has precious little flexibility to deal with the economic problems here, because Turkey has received a huge loan from the International Monetary Fund. And the Monetary Fund, the IMF, puts you in an economic straightjacket.
Now, of course, if the IMF regimen prescription for healing Turkey's economy works, then of course Mr. Erdogan can take the credit. If it doesn't, then he follows his predecessors.
MANN: Walter Rodgers, thanks very much.
Hanging over all of this is one very important question: will the Justice and Development Party use religion to run the country? No one really knows; Turkey's never had an Islamist government before, not in its modern history. But its most vibrant city, Istanbul, has, and so if you're curious about the future, Istanbul, Tayyip Erdogan's Istanbul, is a good place to look.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
(voice-over): It's been a long time since Istanbul's first Islamist mayor, and in the seven centuries since Sultan Faith conquered this city, a lot has changed.
Istanbul is what much of Turkey would like to be, richer, freer and better governed. Tayyip Erdogan was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994. A lot of people were concerned about fundamentalism, but instead they got the fundamentals.
The impoverished Gazi (ph) neighborhood of Istanbul has a new look now. The poor are being fed in city soup kitchens. More of their children are being schooled because of scholarships the city government provides.
Mazar Gomez (ph) has lived in Gazi (ph) for 30 years.
"No changes," he told us. But his face visibly brightens when we ask about Tayyip Erdogan.
"When he was the mayor, of course things changed," he says. "This was all messy around here. The roads were built. The cemeteries were cleaned up. And it's now even very beautiful."
But there was another kind of cleanup on aptly named Liberty Street, where men and women mix and the beer flows liberally.
"The guys in the municipality had a different philosophy," this restaurant owner told us. "And they imposed a ban on tables outside."
Officially, the city said it was trying to make the pedestrian area easier to navigate by forcing sidewalk cafes indoors, but many Instanbuli (ph) believe the mix of men, women and alcohol was more than the Islamists could bear.
In any case, the city quickly surrendered.
"We got organized against it, and we were able to defeat the ban."
Public transit got better under Erdogan, but he isn't given credit for it. Instead, it's alleged the system is corrupt. Erdogan is known as the man who cleaned up City Hall, but a state prosecutor says the mayor made his money on the bus system.
ZAMAN: Well, there's a whole range of court cases that he's facing on corruption charges, but so far the evidence has been very flimsy, and they haven't been able to nail him down with anything.
MANN: But what Erdogan has or has not done is less important to many people that what he said.
Fiery rhetoric years ago sent him to jail for inciting religious intolerance, and kept him from running on Sunday.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
The corruption allegations are just one of the problems that may keep Tayyip Erdogan out of power. He's in a lot of different kinds of trouble with Turkish courts. So much so that people are saying that in fact it may be someone else who serves as Turkey's next prime minister.
We'll talk to one candidate when INSIGHT from Ankara returns.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MANN: Kujatapin (ph) Mosque in central Ankara is one of the newer places of worship here. They built it about a decade ago, but first they built a department store underneath.
Welcome back to Ankara.
That's the mosque behind us here. A mosque above a shopping mall. Probably the best symbol you could find, in this city anyway, of modern Turkey.
Let's choose another example: a political party that represents the views of the most pious Muslims in this country coming to power and vowing to run a secular state. If that seems like a dilemma, the Justice and Development Party has a more immediate one. Its leader is essentially locked out of office.
Tayyip Erdogan, after all, couldn't run as a candidate in Sunday's vote. What are they going to do? Well, some people suggest that someone else can serve as prime minister in his place, someone like a man named Abdullah Gul.
We spoke to Gul a short time ago, and he suggests the opposite. He said that the party and the new government will have very high on its agenda immediate action to address Tayyip Erdogan's inconvenient and unusual position.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ABDULLAH GUL, AK PARTY DEPUTY CHAIRMAN: Unfortunately now, we see the shortcomings of Turkish democracy.
This man, he (UNINTELLIGIBLE) six years ago. Because of that, he was put in prison. There was no violation. There was no clash, but a peaceful demonstration. Then we changed the constitution, we changed the law. We made -- we created a new atmosphere, OK. Something was wrong yesterday, today it's not wrong. So we enlarged the border of the democratic standards here.
But unfortunately, the city, before the election, they said no. Once you are in the prison, you cannot run. But people (UNINTELLIGIBLE) in the ballot box.
MANN: My understanding is that it will take a real effort to get the legal changes, the constitutional changes, that would make it possible for him to be prime minister. Is the party going to do that? Is the new government going to do that? Or will it be possible to essentially have divided leadership, with one man serving as prime minister, and another, outside the government, essentially leading it from outside?
GUL: Well, at the moment, we have to do this, of course. But if we have to change the laws and the constitution also, because our aim is to upgrade the Turkish democracy to the level of the European Union.
MANN: When you talk about constitutional changes, people get nervous, both here and Turkey and outside, so let me ask you -- there are Islamist parties in countries like Indonesia, Pakistan and Iran. There are Jewish parties in Israel. And there are Christian Democratic parties in Europe. When you look at all of those, what kind of party will your party be, in government?
GUL: Look, we call ourselves as a conservative democratic party. This is when you talk about conservatism, religion, tradition, historic culture, this and that. But we know what we want to do. We want to prove to the world that a country with a Muslim identity can be a democratic, can be transparent, and can be comfortable with the modern world.
This will be a good gift to world peace in fact.
MANN: You're making your points very clearly here. But I'm wondering if in speaking today you regret the kinds of things that have been said in the past, speeches that spoke of an uprising of Muslims around the world, talk of minarets as bayonets and the domes of mosques as helmets. One remark more recently, attributed to Tayyip Erdogan, in which he was said to have declared that birth control was no longer necessary for Turkey, that women here should have more children.
When you look back at those kinds of things, do you regret that they were said?
GUL: Yes, we regret -- I mean, I think many things were exaggerated in the past, OK. (UNINTELLIGIBLE) was going on in those days.
Now we have to be realistic. We have to be realistic. We have to recognize the realities of country and war, and we should act accordingly.
MANN: So people here will notice a change. Let me ask you if the IMF, or if NATO, or if the people in Washington, and in particular the people at the Pentagon, are going to notice a change in the government of Turkey?
GUL: Well, I know that there are some hesitations, but I think that there is no need for that. We are rational people. We recognize the realities. We will cooperate and in our country we will debate all the issues.
Turkey and America, we are strategic allies. This will be even strengthened. Definitely, we have to talk, we have to cooperate. The IMF (UNINTELLIGIBLE) our international institution. We will talk, of course, I mean, we will, altogether.
But one thing is very important, we have to put our home in order first.
MANN: There could in the near future be a war between Washington and Baghdad, between the United States and Iraq. What's Turkey going to do?
GUL: Well, first of all, of course, I mean, the war is not good, OK, in this region. War is not good anywhere, OK, because people will die and suffer. and the people of this region have been suffering a lot. We have to avoid the war. I mean, we will try. The United States also should try for that.
But at the same time, of course, we don't want to see dangerous weapons in our neighboring country.
MANN: Dr. Gul, thank you so much for talking to us.
GUL: Thank you.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MANN: A man to watch.
We'll take a break now, and talk more about the election and the outcome when INSIGHT from Ankara returns.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MANN: From a top a statue in downtown Ankara, a bronze commander on horseback. It is Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, and if he could see, especially if he could smell, the reason for the election results would be clear.
Welcome back to Ankara.
There are places in this city where the smell of cheap black coal smoke hangs in the air. It's not legal to burn that kind of coal in this city, but so many people are in such dire financial straits, they don't have any choice, and they use it to fuel and heat their homes. You can literally see the hard times in the haze at dusk.
Economic problems really pervaded this election, but we're paying attention to something quite different: the emergence of an Islamic party. Could it be, though, that a country which voted the economy finds that its new government has its own very different agenda?
Joining us now to talk about that is a columnist with "Achung" (ph) newspaper, Semih Idiz.
Thanks so much for being with us.
SEMIH IDIZ, POLITICAL ANALYST: Pleasure.
MANN: Are we making too much of a fuss about this? Not enough? How big a change is this going to be?
IDIZ: Well, I mean, this party does have a past that makes a lot of people in this country cautious.
On the other hand, they are definitely giving it the benefit of the doubt at the moment, and going by its word that it is a reform party, so to speak.
Even the other party, the Republican People's Party, that got into parliament today, and it's the only other party that did so, is doing exactly that, and its leader, Deniz Baykal, tonight, in various interview on television, said that he was prepared to give this party the benefit of the doubt rather than jump to any conclusions about what it might or might not do.
MANN: Now, one thing that we haven't talked about on this program is that this is a big change for Turkey, because this will be a majority government. What does that mean?
IDIZ: Well, it means a strong government, apart from anything else, and if it subscribes to its party platform, which wasn't a religious one. It was more along social justice and social democracy lines. It means that we can actually see some long overdue laws implemented, especially the EU is waiting to see some implementation.
MANN: When was the last time -- forgive me for interrupting. When was the last time Turkey had a majority government?
IDIZ: Well, it was with the Uzal (ph) period in the early 80's, but that of course was in the environment of a military coupe, so it was a completely different situation. And before that, it was the late 50's, which produced the Mendelez (ph) government, but again -- we're talking about a democratic environment at the time, but this was the most democratic environment that produced a single-party government, so to speak, that we've had.
MANN: Now, there was one newspaper, not yours, that joked about a headline in its paper today, saying that it would run across its front page, "Don't Worry, There's Always the Military." It suggests people are concerned, and at the same time, everyone seems to think, well, at least there's someone else who could always take charge. Do you think that's in the cards? Is the military likely to do something about this kind of government?
IDIZ: I think the military is going to keep very low on this and see how it plays out. I don't think they're going to jump to any conclusions either, but it is a fact that there are strong elements in this country that feel confident that there is a staunchly secularist military that considers itself the guardian of the republic as a parliamentary democracy.
This isn't always understood in Europe, but it is the case here in Turkey.
MANN: Well, people are watching I Europe, so what do you think? Does this make, to your mind, Turkey, a stronger, more democratic candidate for EU membership, with this kind of government in place?
IDIZ: Well, as I say, ironically, it's going to be a quote/unquote "Islamist" party that's going to implement some of the rules and regulations that the Europeans have been looking for, especially in the areas of freedom of conscience and freedom and thought.
So if there are people in Europe who are afraid that there's an Islamist party in Turkey, they certainly have a dilemma, because it's going to be the party that brings the country closer to European political criteria.
MANN: People are terrified of that word, Islamist. They think it means fundamentalist. Are you terrified?
IDIZ: Well, no, I'm not. I, as a Turk, and as I say, I keep repeating it, I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to drop my guard and let them have their way if things go awry, so to speak, but yes, well, it's a new era for Turkey, and we're hoping for the best.
MANN: Semih Idiz, of "Achung" (ph), thanks so much for being with us.
IDIZ: Thank you.
MANN: One final word before we leave you from Ankara, and it's about the government that's just been elected. Turkey's new leaders can feel that the country's people, its army, its establishment, are watching their every move, but they can also feel the gaze coming from other quarters, and that is from the leaders and peoples of other Muslim nations.
Muslim nations have not been lucky when it comes to democracy, and Turkey counts itself really as a rare exception. Turkey's new leaders say there's no question about imposing Islam on Turkey's democracy, but maybe using this as an opportunity to introduce democracy to Islam elsewhere.
That's all for this edition of INSIGHT from Ankara. Thanks so much for joining us.
END
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