Domestic peace elusive in Turkey
Turkey’s efforts to resolve conflicts with its neighbors and offer more rights to its Kurdish citizens have failed to make the country a more peaceful place, according to a recent international report.
Despite its much-vaunted “zero problems with neighbors” policy, Turkey’s relations with neighboring countries showed a decrease in 2010 compared to the previous three years, according to the 2010 Global Peace Index released Tuesday by the Institute for Economics and Peace.
The failure of the initiative came as no surprise to Haldun Solmaztürk, the chair of the U.S. desk at the Turkish Center for International Relations and Strategic Analysis, or TÜRKSAM. “It is a good policy in principle, but it is not applied properly,” Solmaztürk said. “This is mainly due to a weak background and lack of vision of the leaders who try to drive such a policy, which creates an open-ended process where everyone is constantly waiting for something to happen.”
The world has become less peaceful in 2010, according to the latest Global Peace Index, which attempts to measure the relative position of nations’ and regions’ peacefulness. The report, released Tuesday, reflects a less peaceful world in 2010, where violence impacts the global economy by $7 trillion annually.
He added that “zero problems with neighbors” would be difficult to successfully attain in any event, as it sometimes – as with closer ties to Syria and Iran – represents interests that conflict with Turkey’s “long history of good relations with Western countries.” Reversing such a long-lasting trend, he said, would confuse the country’s foreign policy even more.
The Australia-based peace institute ranked Turkey 126th out of 149 countries on its 2010 Global Peace Index, which looked at internal and external factors such as conflicts, military capacity, respect for human rights and relations with neighboring countries. It is the fourth year the report has been compiled.
The index gave low grades to Turkey in terms of its level of organized internal conflict and its military capacity, which both remain high. The level of internal conflict, however, showed a small improvement this year compared to 2009.
The high level of internal conflict is normal, according to Serhat Erkmen, the chair of the International Relations Department at Ahi Evran University, who said Turkey is dealing with one of the most violent terrorist organizations in the region, referring to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.
PKK attacks had decreased before 2005, but ramped up again when the group’s leader, Abdullah Öcalan, was captured, said Murat Bilhan, the head of the Foreign Policy Platform at Istanbul Kültür University.
According to Solmaztürk, various governments have delayed addressing the Kurdish problem and left the issue to Turkish military forces to resolve. “Not only current but also previous governments could not define this problem,” he said.
Experts also believe it is normal for Turkey to have higher rates of military capacity due to its geographic position in a conflict-rich region. Still, Bilhan said, the Turkish military is not as sophisticated as it should be, adding that it should increase research and development while decreasing its current unnecessary spending.
In addition, military capacity does not necessarily show how violent or peaceful a country is, Erkmen said, noting that the Turkish military is active in many peace missions and does not use its military power as a threat to external or internal actors. Solmaztürk agreed that how military power is used is more important than its capacity.
Though the level of respect for human rights in Turkey is relatively high, the report said, it showed a decrease compared to last year, something Solmaztürk attributed to the lack of a sincere political will to address the issue.
“Unless political leaders embrace such principles themselves, their urging for respect of human rights and the relevant documents signed by them will be useless,” he said.
Erkmen said he had observed an improvement in Turkey’s human-rights performance this year, but that more efforts need to be made, citing Turkey’s bad grades on this subject in other international reports.
Intolerance and disrespect for human rights is common within state institutions, political actors and the wider society, according to Bilhan, who is also the vice president of the Turkish Asian Center for Strategic Studies, or TASAM. Given Turkey’s current intolerant atmosphere, he said, the country’s ranking on the Global Peace Index was rather high.
“Gender, ethnic, religious and other discriminations are so common in society that people openly say in surveys that they do not want Jews or gypsies as neighbors,” Bilhan said, adding that this problem is not caused by laws but by a lack of education. The current government has made some improvements to the laws on human rights, but they are not totally reflected in society, where the level of prejudice is still high, he said.
Data used to compile the report also showed an increase in the level of perceived criminality in society over the past four years, potentially reflecting a lack of trust in courts and police. “Turks do not trust the police and gendarmerie,” Solmaztürk said. “They also do not trust the judiciary, believing justice will not be served there.”
Origin: HurriyetDailyNews.com
