The legal prohibition on commenting on the election itself will be lifted this evening, and until that time editorial writers are obliged to while the time away talking about pleasanter things. It seems the ideal opportunity to discuss the one great office that is meant to be above politics -- that of the president who, is obliged to shed his party stripes the moment he takes his oath. This has been a particularly frantic week for President Abdullah Gül, who has made two historic visits abroad that shed light on Turkey’s two principal foreign policy concerns. He made the first visit to post-Saddam Iraq and met with the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader whose aspirations for some sort of autonomy in the north of Iraq were once regarded as anathema. It is not entirely clear whether Mr. Gül referred to the Kurdish region by its proper name, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). However, the very act of meeting with Mr. Talabani on his own turf as well as with the KRG leader Nechirvan Barzani would appear to be a major relaxation of the Turkish Republican project to avoid defining in ethnic terms what their Ottoman predecessors referred to as Kurdistan. I have beside me a new volume by anthropologist Christopher Houston titled “Kurdistan: Crafting of National Selves,” which I commend as an authoritative guide to the evolution of the way history, politics and ethnicity are constructed in a turbulent region.
I recall the recent Abant Platform conference in the KRG capital Arbil, when one of the Turkish speakers defended the right to call the region Northern Iraq in deference to the other ethnic populations of the region -- Turkomans and Assyrians who lived there. Of course, by that logic one should refer to the Republic of Turkey (Türkiye) as the “North Eastern Middle East” or (if Mr. Gül’s second visit goes as planned) as “Far Eastern Europe.”
Mr. Gül’s other watershed trip has been to Brussels. It is a city he visited as foreign minister in trying to get Turkey’s EU application on the table, but it is surprising to take stock that he is the first Turkish president to make an official visit to the hub of the very Europe Turkey hopes to join. Mr. Gül’s visit to Iraq was intended to bring some sort of peace to one of Turkey’s most troubled borders. He was trying to complete the historic handshake, extending support for the Kurdish project in Iraq in exchange for the Iraqi Kurds containing their support for the radical Kurdish project in Turkey -- or at least one enforced by the militant supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The success of that deal very much depends on Turkey making progress within its own territory of turning Kurdish dissent into a democratic process. Kurdish public broadcasting is a step; the current pursuit in the courts of those responsible for the dirty war in the 1990s is another.
However, an equally important step is for Turkey to re-engage with a process of reform. And there is little doubt that the most expedient way of doing so it to dust off its European application. The ultimate importance of Mr. Gül’s official visit will be to give fresh momentum to that process and to demonstrate not just to the bureaucrats of Europe but to the people of his own country that Turkey still means business. The faded truism of Turkish politics is that in the run-up to an election -- even a municipal poll -- governments try to consolidate their support and do not risk embarking on new initiatives. However, come 8 p.m. tonight the pre-election period will come to its official end, and the time to move forward will begin.
