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. Read more…
