So I was pleasantly surprised to discover, quite by accident, in the darkened corner of my hard disk drive, a file from June 2002 which I had trouble even remembering having written in the first place and which I am sure makes better sense now than it did at the time. Credit where credit is due, the words were not entirely mine but a transcript of a farewell interview with the European Union ambassador, Karen Fogg, who was leaving Turkey after four years on the job.Fogg, some will remember, was the representative at a time when Ankara was being forced to focus on getting its membership application taken seriously. It was an exercise which many people in Turkey did not like and Fogg had the misfortune of being turned into the embodiment of the judgmental nature of the EU, the hectoring schoolmarm trying to get an idle political class to do some work.
From the very start, she was in trouble with the press (whom she said in the interview had from the very start set out to trip her up by fair means and mainly foul). They invented stories -- that she had proclaimed during a trip to Tunceli that she was surprised to see the Turkish flag flying in a rebel Kurdish stronghold. They willfully misinterpreted her -- attempts to arrange meetings with European NGOs and Alevi community leaders were described as an effort “to divide Turkey.” The final straw was when her e-mail correspondence was hacked and leaked to the nationalist leftwing Aydınlık and much quoted in the nationalist rightwing pages of the Hürriyet newspaper.
Turkey is justifiably huffy when its ambassador to Israel was made to sit on a low chair, but once upon a time the European representative to Turkey could not get a court injunction to stop her private correspondence, illegally obtained, from being published in the newspapers. The e-mails were meant to prove that she abused her status as a diplomat to sabotage the interests of a country she had been sent to befriend. Among the worst of her offenses were her rude remarks against the president or “HOR.” She explained that this acronym did not stand for head of republic but that she was in fact being facetious about herself (head of representation).
Why was she the victim of so concerted an attack? In Fogg’s words:
“There are people who are deeply hostile to the open society and open economy which the EU represents. Their own reasons may be clearly ideological because they believe in a strong state role in society and the economy -- an antiquated Marxist idea about how Turkey should develop. There are also people who have a xenophobia about foreigners and cannot get over a mistrust of European intentions. There are also people who do not want a transparent and open society because they have dealings which would not survive inspection. And there are people who are influenced by rhetorical arguments and poison in the press. Let’s call them a silent majority. These are people who could be encouraged to show more confidence in the European Union once the EU shows some more supportive activities either in financial cooperation or once Turkey manages to move further down the accession path and demonstrate to itself that this is not a painful but a beneficial process.”
What she described then seems to me a fairly accurate description of the odd coalition which is now dubbed Ergenekon -- a group of people, some of whom acting from the best of motives and some from the very worst -- and whose ends were as distorted as their means. Of course the editor of Aydınlık is now in jail on remand on charges of being a member of an armed conspiracy, with the prosecutor demanding a sentence of between 244 and 497 years. The editor of Hürriyet faces a happier future, though he has just stepped down from his job. Ambassador Fogg, too, has recently retired from the commission. Turkey might care to reflect that she was a better friend than they gave her credit for at the time.
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