30 October 2009 / SABAH ERDAL ŞAFAK,
“There is no other like our Turkey.” This is a refrain we heard often from many members of the crowded delegation (of which we were a part) that accompanied Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on his four-day trip to Pakistan and Iran, and they were right in saying this because the two nations we were visiting are both really “police states.”
Lessons we learned on this trip to Pakistan and Iran: 1. Projects that don’t attempt to create one nation out of different ethnic groups -- or at the very least find a shared platform over which these different ethnic groups can come together -- are condemned to failure. Just as we see in Pakistan. 2. Attempts to modernize that don’t gain their power from the people of the nation and which rely instead on a “top down” mentality start, after a certain point, to head backward. As we see in Iran.
