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Erdogan tells Macron cooperation has ‘very serious potential’
In a video call, the Turkish president says dialogue has always played an important role in relations as NATO members work to normalise ties.
2 Mar 2021

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told French President Emmanuel Macron that cooperation between the two countries has “very serious potential” as the NATO members work to normalise ties after bitter disputes last year.

In a statement, the Turkish presidency said on Tuesday Erdogan told Macron in a video call that dialogue between leaders has always played an important role in relations.

“As two strong NATO allies, we can make significant contributions to peace, stability, and peace efforts in a wide geography – from Europe to the Caucasus, the Middle East, and Africa,” Erdogan said.

He noted 2021 marks the centennial of the Ankara Agreement, which is the basis of Turkish-French bilateral relations and said the two countries have “serious cooperation potential”.

Erdogan said the two nations can take joint steps to fight “terrorism”, stressing it threatens both countries and their people.

“We hope Turkey and France can act in solidarity on all these issues,” he said....

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David

How Erdogan's Increasingly Erratic Rule in Turkey Presents a Risk to the World
BY IAN BREMMER MARCH 4, 2021 11:38 AM EST

Over the past 18 years, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has consolidated more power than any leader since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. He has transformed Turkey’s politics, faced down a military coup, and rewritten the country’s constitution to give his presidency additional power. But his combative style and autocratic instincts have earned him critics at home and abroad. His biggest political problem at the moment is economic: unemployment stands near 14%, inflation remains in double digits, and the pandemic grinds on.

The president and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) are paying a political price for all this. President Erdogan has trailed rival Ekrem Imamoglu in head-to-head matchups in a number of recent polls. A recent poll from Turkiye Raporu found that the AKP’s vote share in a prospective election has fallen below 30 percent for the first time ever. Erdogan’s willingness to allow a new Central Bank governor to sharply raise interest rates late last year has stabilized conditions by cooling inflation and attracting more foreign investment. As COVID-19 weighs more heavily on household wealth, domestic political pressure is growing, and demand for change is rising. In coming months, Erdogan may well revert to the kind of quick fix economic policies that made Turkey so fragile in the first place....

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David

Iraq: Turkey Set to Attack the Yazidis?
by Uzay Bulut March 8, 2021 at 4:00 am

If Turkey targets Sinjar, it will not be the first Turkish military assault against the region. In 2017, Turkish warplanes dropped bombs on Sinjar, hitting a civilian clinic.

"'[A]nalysts should understand that the fundamental reason that Yezidis join military units is to defend the land from a genocidal invasion.... no one, including Turkey, has the right to expel Yezidis from their homeland under the pretext of the conflict with PKK." — Pari Ibrahim, Executive Director of the Free Yezidi Foundation, interview with Gatestone, February 3, 2021.

"We want Sinjar to be under the control of formal Iraqi security forces.... according to the rule of law. Turkey wants much more than Sinjar. Turkey wants to use various excuses to expand its military presence in Iraq and Syria. The whole PKK claim is just an excuse for Turkey's expansionism in the region." — Murad Ismael, former executive director of Yazda, interview with Gatestone, February 12, 2021

"Yezidis literally suffered a genocide at the hands of ISIS... Turkey did not take any steps whatsoever to combat ISIS before, during, or after the ISIS atrocities. But now, when Yezidis have been left homeless and are striving to rebuild our land, Turkey warns that it may unilaterally and illegally attack Sinjar.... this is our homeland. It is not a battleground for other forces to use as they see fit." — Pari Ibrahim, interview with Gatestone, February 3, 2021....

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David

Turkey: Erdoğan's War on Peace
by Burak Bekdil
March 11, 2021 at 5:00 am

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The margin of victory [by the opposition candidate Ekrem İmamoglu in the 2019 Istanbul mayoral election] shocked Erdoğan and his party establishment. That night marked an unforgettable defeat for the invincible Erdoğan. It also marked a new, advanced phase in Islamists' war on Kurds.

Erdoğan advocates more subtle ways to intimidate opposition. He has been jailing HDP's democratically elected leaders, MPs and mayors, and appointing trustees in their place.

Erdoğan does not have to shut down the HDP when he has de facto crippled it. The party's two co-chairmen, Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, have been in jail since 2016.

In February, the crackdown took a new ugly turn. Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a former Islamist, human rights activist and HDP MP, retweeted a post in 2016, advocating peace in the Kurdish dispute. A Turkish court sentenced him to 2½ years in jail for the retweet -- although, ironically, the original tweet source had not been indicted. In February the Supreme Court of Appeals upheld Gergerlioglu's sentence for "spreading terrorist propaganda" -- five years after the retweet.

Erdogan's Kurdish problem, however, has the potential to cost him more than just Istanbul. Research found that the fertility rate in the Kurdish-speaking, eastern part of Turkey was 3.41, as opposed to an average of 2.09 in the Turkish-speaking, non-eastern areas. Kurdish votes in the presidential election year 2023 may reach seven million: Kurds could be the kingmakers....

Snip... That night marked an unforgettable defeat for the invincible Erdoğan.,,,

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David

Call me? US-Turkey reset faces long list of hurdles
By SUZAN FRASER
today

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has toned down his anti-Western and anti-US rhetoric in an apparent effort to reset the rocky relationship with his NATO allies, but so far he’s been met by silence from U.S. President Joe Biden.

Nearly two months into his presidency, Biden still hasn’t called Erdogan, which some in Turkey see as a worrying sign. By contrast, former President Donald Trump and Erdogan spoke just days after the 2016 election.

Ties between Ankara and Washington — which once considered each other as strategic partners — have steadily deteriorated in recent years over differences on Syria, Turkey’s cooperation with Russia and more recently on Turkish naval interventions in the eastern Mediterranean, which U.S. officials have described as destabilizing.

Despite tensions, many within Erdogan’s government were hoping for four more years of the administration led by Trump, who had a personal rapport with Erdogan and didn’t give him any lectures about Turkey’s human rights record....

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David

Biden Needs to Handle the Turkey Dossier with Utmost Care
by Burak Bekdil March 17, 2021 at 4:00 am

Erdoğan is waiting for an opportunity to "persuade" Biden that his Islamist regime is in fact a staunch ally of the Western civilization.

What Erdoğan diplomatically refers to as "common interests" are in reality a list of Turkish demands: 1) Remove Turkey from the CAATSA list. 2) Allow Turkey to activate its Russian-made air defense architecture. 3) Ignore the Turkish public bank's role in violating U.S. sanctions on Iran. 4) End the U.S. alliance with Syrian Kurds and allow Turkey to crush them. 5) Praise, do not criticize, Turkey's democratic record.

An aggressive overt and covert Turkish lobbying campaign in Washington will soon begin. As a first sign, Turkey has hired a Washington-based law firm, Arnold & Porter, to lobby for its readmission to the F-35 program. Under the six-month, $750,000 contract, Arnold & Porter will "advise on a strategy for [the Turkish defense procurement agency] and Turkish contractors to remain within the Joint Strike Fighter Program....

Three U.S. presidential administrations encouraged Erdoğan recklessly to harm Western interests and further destroy whatever pieces of democracy were left in his own country by allowing him to maintain his transactional relationship with the U.S. rather than weakening his regime.

Biden now has a chance to stop and even reverse that unpleasant chapter in modern Turkish history....

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David

MARCH 21, 20213:11 AM UPDATED 12 HOURS AGO
Turkish lira plunges after Erdogan sacks hawkish central bank chief
By Ebru Tuncay, Jonathan Spicer

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey’s lira plunged 15% to near its all-time low after markets opened following President Tayyip Erdogan’s shock weekend decision to oust a hawkish central bank governor and install a like-minded critic of high interest rates.

Turkey's new Central Bank Governor Sahap Kavcioglu sits at his office in Ankara, Turkey March 21, 2021. Turkish Central Bank/Handout via REUTERS
The appointment of Sahap Kavcioglu, a former banker and ruling party lawmaker, in the early hours on Saturday marked the third time since mid-2019 that Erdogan has abruptly fired a central bank chief.

Kavcioglu had sought to ease concerns over a sharp selloff in Turkish assets and a pivot from rate hikes to cuts in a 90-minute call on Sunday, in which he told bank CEOs he planned no immediate policy change, a source told Reuters.

The currency tumbled to as weak as 8.4850 versus the dollar, from 7.2185 on Friday, back to levels touched in early November when it reached an intraday record of 8.58. It last changed hands at 8.0749....

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David

Erdoganistan: The New Islamic Superpower?
by Giulio Meotti March 28, 2021 at 5:00 am

Erdogan was promoting his global campaign of victimization by "Islamophobia", while in fact it is the critics of extremist Islam who are in danger and frequently killed.

In the Caucasus, Turkey has just supported the Azerbaijani war against Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh in order to create a Turkish Islamic corridor between Azerbaijan, Turkey and other Muslim countries.

"It began in 1989 with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie: no Western country reacted except with words – as if they thought a verbal spell might work!.... The battle lost in Armenia is the first of a war waged in the West against the Judeo-Christian civilization". — Michel Onfray, Reveue des deux mondes, February 1, 2021.

While the new sultan extends his influence to Syria, Libya and the Caucasus, he also extends it to the Mediterranean. For pacifist Europe, that sea only exists when it comes to bringing in migrants.

"What the Turkish regime is doing is using its diaspora as a Trojan horse." — Michel Sifaoui, europe1.fr, February 7, 2021.

In Turkey under Erdogan, school textbooks have been rewritten to refer to Jews and Christians as gavur, "infidels." Earlier Turkish textbooks referred to the members of the two religions as the "people of the Book".... The curriculum adopts an anti-American stance, and shows sympathy for the motives of ISIS and al-Qaeda. — Report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), March 2021.

"We are a large family of 300 million people from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China". — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Minval.az, October 18, 2018.

Snip... On that July 24, in 2020,, Erdogan challenged Europe and the West by re-appropriating what had been, for a thousand years, the largest church in Eastern Christianity. The lack of response on the part of the West most likely convinced him that the moment was right. No one paid attention or countered the act....

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David

Turkey: Ex-admirals derided for statement on straits treaty
ANDREW WILKS Sun, April 4, 2021, 6:08 AM·

ISTANBUL (AP) — A group of retired Turkish admirals came under fire Sunday for issuing a statement that government officials tied to Turkey’s history of military coups.

The 103 former navy officers criticized a suggestion that Turkey could withdraw from the international treaty that regulates shipping through the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, which link the Mediterranean Sea to the Black Sea.

Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay compared the statement’s signatories to “cowards whistling in a graveyard.” Numan Kurtulus, the deputy leader of Turkey's ruling party, tweeted that they were the “lovers of old Turkey who see themselves above the will of the nation.”...

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David

Arabs' Real Enemies: Iran and Turkey
by Khaled Abu Toameh April 5, 2021 at 5:00 am

The Arabs are warning the world that Turkey and Iran are funding and arming terrorists, that they a major threat to security and stability in the Middle East, and that they keep meddling in the internal affairs of Arab countries.

The Arabs are also telling the world that the only way to deal with Turkey and Iran is by increasing political and economic pressure on them and holding them to account for their malign actions.

Turkey and Iran, in other words, are telling the Arabs that they can go to hell. They are also telling the Arabs that Turkey and Iran will continue to occupy Arab countries, meddle in their internal affairs, and unleash terrorist attacks to undermine their stability and security.

Veteran Saudi columnist Abdulrahman Al-Rashed warned that Iran's continued "military activities" in the region will likely lead to more chaos that will be increasingly difficult to control.

Al-Rashed also pointed out that the Houthi militia increased its missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia after the Biden administration revoked its designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

[T]he latest Arab warning concerning the Turkish and Iranian threats has gone almost unnoticed by the international community and media. They only pay a great deal of attention to the resolutions of the Arab League foreign ministers when they include -- as they frequently do -- a condemnation of Israel....

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David

Indoctrinated in Hate: 'This Is the Start of the New Caliphate'
by Raymond Ibrahim April 6, 2021 at 4:00 am

Hate-filled indoctrination and training in violence is not limited to the "schools" of ISIS or Boko Haram. Public schools all around the Muslim world share elements of this indoctrination. Most recently, a March 2021 study exposed how the school curriculum of Turkey — for decades one of the Muslim world's most secular nations — is also increasingly full of jihadi propaganda.

"The Turkish curriculum has been significantly radicalized in recent years. Jihad war is introduced as a central value; martyrdom in battle is glorified.... Concepts such as "Turkish World Domination" ... are emphasized. The curriculum adopts an anti-American stance and displays sympathy toward the motivations of ISIS and Al-Qaeda.... Christians and Jews are characterized as infidels instead of People of the Book.... The curriculum demonizes Zionism and verges on anti-Semitic..." — "The Erdoğan Revolution in the Turkish Curriculum Textbooks," IMPACT-se, March 2021.

What will happen in a few decades when all these boys — those raised on absolute hate and violence and those raised on absolute tolerance and nonviolence — become the world's decision-makers?...

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David

What Makes Erdogan Tick?
by Burak Bekdil April 11, 2021 at 4:30 am

At the end of the year, there was a Turkey in deep stages of cold-to-colder-war with the EU (in particular, with EU members Greece, Cyprus and France), Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, General Khalifa Haftar of Libya and the United States (over the S-400 dispute).

Not one of these state actors stepped back and appeased Erdoğan or changed policy in the face of Turkish hostilities.

In December, the Trump administration announced that the U.S. would sanction Turkey for its purchase of the Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile system....

All that must have made Erdoğan tick. Apparently cornered, Erdoğan launched a new charm offensive in November. He said Turkey's future was in Europe -- quite a radical departure from his usual histrionics that Europe is Islamophobic, fascist, racist and Europeans are "remnants of Nazis."

Erdoğan's tough guy manners have finally been decrypted by state and non-state actors in the former Ottoman lands.

"Erdoğan will not back down until you show him teeth. That's what we did when we negotiated the [Syrian] ceasefire in October of 2019. We were ready to crush the economy." — James Jeffrey, former U.S. special envoy for Syria (and former ambassador to Ankara), Al-Monitor....

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David

Turkey: Iranian-Kurdish Political Refugee to be Deported
by Uzay Bulut April 19, 2021 at 4:00 am

An Iranian Kurdish political refugee, Afshin Sohrabzadeh, 31, who suffers from cancer and lives in Turkey, has been held in administrative detention for deportation -- for allegedly "threatening Turkey's security". He is currently being held in a removal center, and, if returned to Iran, he may well face the death penalty.

On April 5, he visited the Eskisehir Immigration Office to get permission to visit a friend in Ankara. Instead, he was held in administrative detention and a decision was made by the authorities to deport him back to Iran.

"Another option that will save Sohrabzadeh is that the UNCHR will step in and announce that he will be resettled in a third and safe country – other than Turkey or Iran."

"As Turkey neighbours Iran, these refugees and their families continue to be exposed to the possibility of persecution by the Iranian intelligence agencies. At the same time, the Turkish immigration services are extremely reluctant to provide them with the administrative cooperation they need to complete their applications for asylum and resettlement in safer countries." – Reporters Without Borders, April 30, 2020.

Turkey is bound by international law not to deport UN-recognized refugees. – Mahmut Kacan, Sohrabzadeh's lawyer, to Gatestone, April 2021.

The UNCHR, the international media, and all human rights groups need to work to save Sohrabzadeh from arrest, torture and virtually certain death in Iran....

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David

Turkey: Erdoğan's Biggest Political Rival
by Burak Bekdil April 21, 2021 at 4:00 am

The lockdown has already put too much economic pressure on small businesses. A total of 125,000 small businesses and shop owners have gone bankrupt during the pandemic. That makes an estimated 500,000 people in Turkey badly affected by the unfortunate blend of economic and pandemic mismanagement...

Growing poverty is seen in other official numbers too. Energy Minister Fatih Dönmez said that power distribution companies cut electricity supplies to 3.7 million households last year due to unpaid debts. That makes more than 10 million Turks having to live without power due to inability to pay bills.

As of December 11, there were 22,759,000 cases of legal proceedings for unpaid debts, corporate and individual. Unemployment is another pressing problem.

This means that means Turkey must maintain its lockdown rules. Further lockdown, however, will mean further economic contraction especially in a country that depends on tourist industry revenues.

The pandemic has further impoverished Turkey's fragile economy. It threatens to do worse damage to the budgets of poorer families, who are the core of the voting public. One recent study says that Erdoğan loyalists are the biggest number of voters who will vote differently or abstain from voting in the next elections.

Erdoğan's biggest political rival appears to be poverty....

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David

The Armenian Genocide Forges On
by Raymond Ibrahim April 24, 2021 at 5:00 am

"At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000.... denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present." — The Genocide Education Project.

Not only has Turkey repeatedly denied culpability for the Armenian Genocide; it appears intent on reigniting it, most recently by helping Azerbaijan wage war on Armenia in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, which again erupted into armed conflict in late 2020.

"Why has Turkey returned to the South Caucasus 100 years [after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire]? To continue the Armenian Genocide." — Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Facebook, October 1, 2020.

These mercenaries and their Azerbaijani partners, among other ISIS-like behavior, "tortured beyond recognition" an intellectually disabled 58-year-old Armenian woman by hacking off her ears, hands, and feet -- before murdering her. Her family was only able to identify her by her clothes.

Answering the question, "If you could get away with one thing, what would you do?" -- asked to random passersby on the streets of Turkey -- a woman recently replied on video: "What would I do? Behead 20 Armenians." She then looked directly at the camera and smiled while nodding her head.

Much of this genocidal hatred should be unsurprising: Turkish public school textbooks, as a recent study found, continue demonizing Armenians -- as well as Jews and Christians....

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David

Turkey’s genocide blackmail: Threats to work closer with Iran and Russia

The Biden administration has called Turkey’s bluff: that it might leave NATO because it is angry to hear the word “genocide” – and that Ankara should never be offended, but can do what it wants.

The US decision to finally recognize the Armenian genocide comes after decades in which Turkey and its lobbyists in Washington threatened the US. Their narrative was that if Washington would just use the term “genocide” – for a crime committed 106 years ago by a former government in what is now Turkey – then Ankara would rapidly move to sanction the US, close its bases, threaten its citizens and ally with Iran, China and Russia, or other US enemies.

This bizarre, mafia-like threat is the same one that Tehran used regarding the Iran deal. It is because non-Western countries learned that the way to deal with Western countries was to prey on their fears. For instance, today Pakistan is threatening to expel France’s ambassador because far-right religious extremists in Pakistan claim to be offended by cartoons published years ago in a French magazine.

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This is one bluff that Trump should have called...

Turkey summons US ambassador after Armenian ‘genocide’ statement
Turkey condemns US President Joe Biden’s statement, says it opens ‘a wound that’s hard to fix in our relations’.
25 Apr 2021

Turkey’s foreign ministry has summoned the US ambassador in Ankara to protest the decision by US President Joe Biden to mark the deportation and killing of Armenians during the Ottoman Empire as “genocide”.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sedat Onal met with David Satterfield on Saturday to express Ankara’s strong condemnation.
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“The statement does not have legal ground in terms of international law and has hurt the Turkish people, opening a wound that’s hard to fix in our relations,” the ministry said.

On Saturday, Biden followed through on a campaign pledge to recognise the events that began in 1915 and killed an estimated 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians as genocide.

The statement was carefully crafted to say the deportations, massacres and death marches took place in the Ottoman Empire....

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David

Turkey: How Erdogan's Pledge for Reform Collapsed in Five Months
by Burak Bekdil April 29, 2021 at 4:00 am

"We don't see ourselves elsewhere but in Europe," Erdoğan said on November 21. "We envisage building our future together with Europe."

According to Turkish news site Gazete Duvar, a total of 128,872 people have been indicted in the past six years for insulting Erdoğan. Of those, 27,824 had to stand trial and 9,556 were convicted.

Apparently, Erdoğan wants a democratic system without opposition.

But who cares about the Constitution in a country where the governing bloc is proposing to close down even the Constitutional Court, in addition to banning opposition parties? All these autocratic measures occurred in the less than half-year since Erdoğan pledged democratic reforms.

A few years ago, then Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu had vehemently refuted claims that Turkey was a second-class democracy. He was right. Turkey has since remained a third-class democracy....

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David

Libya’s top diplomat calls on Turkey to withdraw foreign fighters
Foreign Minister Najla al-Manqoush urges Turkey to comply with UN resolutions, expel foreign fighters from Libyan territory.
3 May 2021

Libya’s top diplomat has called for the departure of foreign forces and mercenaries from the North African country as it heads towards elections later this year.

Najla al-Manqoush, foreign minister of Libya’s interim government, urged Turkey on Monday to implement UN Security Council resolutions demanding the repatriation of more than 20,000 foreign fighters and mercenaries from Libya.

“We call on [Turkey] to take steps to implement all the provisions of … the Security Council resolutions and to cooperate together to expel all foreign forces and mercenaries from the Libyan territories,” al-Manqoush said.

Her remarks came at a joint news conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. He visited Tripoli along with Defence Minister Hulusi Akar and other top military and intelligence officials....

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David