March 8, 2016 5:33
am
Desperate
Europe tiptoes around Turkey to clinch refugee deal
David Gardner
EU
leaders proceed gingerly with an emboldened Erdogan
The EU, buffeted by
the migrant panic, the continuing fallout from the financial and
eurozone crises, and the possibility of a British departure from the
union, is being pushed into alliance with leaders who hold its values
in contempt. Paralysed into tawdry realpolitik, it is surrendering
soft power: the attraction of an open society based on shared and
codified values of freedom.
So it is in this
week’s latest attempt to make Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey the
EU bulwark holding back the waves of refugees converging on Europe
from Syria and elsewhere. President Erdogan chose this moment, right
after talks with Donald Tusk, president of the EU Council, to show
Europeans how much he respects the freedoms underpinning their union.
While he opened with
great fanfare a third bridge across the Bosphorus, physically linking
Europe and Asia, his courts effectively closed the best-selling Zaman
newspapers, one of the last media groups outside government control.
Police violently dispersed protesters outside Zaman’s offices.
Freedom of assembly is as constricted as freedom of expression in Mr
Erdogan’s Turkey, and he seems happy to exhibit it.
The Zaman group was
taken in a forced entry by court-appointed trustees — who are no
more than government trusties. The same happened last October with
the takeover of another media group. Both groups are linked to former
allies, now bitter rivals, of Mr Erdogan’s neo-Islamist Justice and
Development party (AKP).
The government
explanation for this new offensive against the media is that the
courts are combating a “parallel state” embedded in Turkey’s
institutions by Fethullah Gulen, a US-based Islamist preacher they
accuse of trying to mount a coup.
The shadowy Gulenist
network, with cadres in the police, the judiciary and the
intelligence services, was once a prized asset for Mr Erdogan. It
provided the shock-troops the AKP government needed to defang the
army, in a series of baroque conspiracy trials in 2008-10 that
ensnared secular dissidents — and anyone who had the temerity to
investigate the Gulenists. While any state would try to root out such
secret cells, Mr Erdogan only started doing so after Gulenist
prosecutors launched a graft probe reaching deep into his inner
circle in 2013.
Similarly, the
government’s claim that it is respecting the independence of the
judiciary is threadbare. Mr Erdogan closed down the 2013 corruption
investigation and purged thousands of police and hundreds of
prosecutors. The policemen and judges that in 2014 intercepted and
investigated a clandestine shipment of arms by Turkey’s main
intelligence service to jihadi rebels in Syria are in jail. Can
Dundar and Erdem Gul, journalists who published evidence of that
shipment, are charged with espionage. When the Constitutional Court
released them from preventive detention last week, Mr Erdogan said he
would not recognise this “unconstitutional” ruling.
Turkey, a Nato ally
and EU candidate member, came 149th in the press freedom index of
Reporters without Borders last year, just above the Democratic
Republic of Congo and Russia. In the 18 months since he ascended from
the prime minister’s office to his new presidential palace that
dwarfs Versailles, 1,845 charges of defaming Mr Erdogan — mostly on
Twitter — have been issued. Scores of prominent columnists have
been fired by proprietors fearful of presidential wrath.
As EU leaders, in
their desperation to strike a deal to in effect pay for Turkish
territory to shield their frontiers and serve as a holding pen for
refugees, Mr Erdogan reminds them that, for him, there are no
boundaries left. The so-called Copenhagen Criteria of EU democratic
club-rules come a poor second to his Ankara rules.
This is partly
Europe’s fault. From 2008 Germany called into question Turkey’s
bona fides as a club member, seeing it as too big, too poor and,
above all, too Muslim. That was when EU accession was serving as an
engine of constitutional reform and democratic transition. Since then
Turkey has cut loose from its western moorings, pulled east by Mr
Erdogan’s delusions of a neo-Ottoman Middle East. The Turkey Europe
and Angela Merkel, German chancellor, are re-embracing is under the
thumb of one man.
Aside from money,
Brussels is offering to relaunch Turkey’s long-stalled accession
talks. That is worth doing only so long as the EU starts with its
laws on freedoms and justice — good for Turkey and maybe even for
Europe’s tarnished reputation.
david.gardner@ft.com
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