Al-Bashir is charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of “running a campaign of genocide that killed 35,000 people outright, at least another 100,000 through a ‘slow death’ and of forcing 2.5 million to flee their homes in Darfur.” Many put the figure much higher. Ankara, though not a signatory to the ICC and not technically the ones who issued the invitation, was under pressure from its European allies either not to entertain a man wanted for such heinous crimes or to detain him were he to show up on Turkish soil. Some jurists argue that Turkey would, under its own criminal code, have been obliged to detain the Sudanese leader.We can only guess at the not one minute but last-minute diplomacy that kept al-Bashir from boarding the İstanbul-bound plane. While the Turkish government may be tempted to congratulate itself on salvaging the situation, it knows it has not emerged from the incident unscathed. As Şahin Alpay and Yavuz Baydar pointed out on this page yesterday, Ankara has weakened its authority as a disinterested regional actor. Moreover, it does so at a time when some foreign commentators are beginning to ask whether Turkey is not casting off its Western moorings. The better question is whether Ankara is not drifting into a solpsistic moral universe of its own devising.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did little to defuse these criticisms by appearing to defend al-Bashir from the charge of genocide. In an extraordinary aside to reporters, Mr. Erdoğan confided that he couldn’t speak to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the same ease that he could chat to his pal, Omar. Stranger still, he said the accusations of genocide were clearly bogus as “no Muslim could do such a thing.” Mr. Erdoğan sometimes succeeds in brazening out an uncomfortable situation by committing the same faux pas on a grander scale. This time he has only succeeded in tying himself up into even bigger knots.
One can share Mr. Erdoğan’s hope that a deep and abiding faith would discourage anyone from overseeing the death of an innocent civilian population. No one could accuse Saddam Hussein of a being devout man, but he did use poisonous gas on the Kurdish city of Halabja. Similarly, the Indonesian government did not invade East Timor in the name of Islam, but they were responsible for a reign of terror that lasted over 20 years. Mr. Erdoğan must know that he himself risks being accused of false piety, of overlooking the nature of the regime in Sudan to defend burgeoning Turkish commercial interests. And, of course, every time the prime minister mentions the word “genocide” he gives the impression of playing word games with what happened in Ottoman territory in 1915.
Of course, Turkey would not be the first nation to be accused of such hypocrisy in protecting its own interests. America once stood in the way of sanctions against Indonesia over East Timor. The West only truly condemned the gassing of the Kurds in 1988 after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. However, in the case of genocide no number of wrongs can make a right.
The question remains how Mr. Erdoğan was allowed to embark on a course that has weakened his own prestige. One explanation is that his mind is on bigger battles. A government intent on changing the Republican mindset on Kurdishness might be forgiven for thinking it need not pay attention to other matters. Another excuse is that the prime minister no longer hears critical or impartial advice. That portion of the Turkish press, which rallies to the government flag, did the prime minister no favors by under-reporting the controversy. Flattery has only encouraged the government to pursue a line it must now regret.
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