Director at the Middle East Institute in Washington is just another mouth piece of Erdogan's Islamist party..

Gonul Tol is the Director for the Center for Turkish Studies at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Her remarks below shows that she is not capable of capturing what truly is happening in Turkey.

Turkey is an important country for the future of the Middle East not because of its role as regional mediator. The current Lebanese crisis is the most recent example of the limitations of Turkey’s mediation efforts in the region. Rather, Turkey is important because it represents the manifestation of the very same post-ideological condition that gave birth to the recent uprisings in the Middle East. The failure of two competing ideologies - Kemalism and Islamism - to deliver on their promises led to a new era in Turkish politics. Kemalism, the founding ideology of the Turkish Republic, has lost its monopoly over modernization. Kurds, Alawites, non-Muslims, and all those who have been excluded from the Kemalist project have pushed for a new, modern discourse that tolerates the articulation of different identities in public sphere. Political participation is not confined to those who subscribe to Kemalist ideology anymore. Turkey is in a post-ideological era where Islam and secularism co-exist, each subconsciously influencing and transforming the other. It has produced its own modernity and represents an alternative democratization path that is organically linked to local culture and yet in dialogue with global norms and ideas. The process that is just starting in the rest of the Middle East has been proceeding in Turkey for some time.

Link to follow the rest of her remarks...


There is some truth in her articulation but the root cause is not related to the shotcomings in Kemalist ideology, it is our collective failure, the lack of indoctrinating Kemalist revolutions into the inner steps of Anatolia and poor villages of Eastern provinces since the death of Kemal Ataturk in 1938.

On all other accounts, her remarks are utterly and factually wrong. Alawites, non-muslims, Jews, Armenians, Kurds in exclusion of those who live in Eastern provinces have never been excluded, just on the contrary, those are the groups who are staunch defenders of Kemalist principles. AKP's leadership has been slowly transforming the country to a regime that has no tolerance to opposition. They were successful in their fear politics in silencing anyone who they deem to be an obstacle in reaching the goal of converting Ataturk's secular Turkey to Abdulhamit's Ottoman times where media censorship and jailing without evidence was a usual daily matter. Today, US has condemned Iran for the arrests of newscasters, journalists, intellectuals, anyone against Islamic Republic's voice. Well, the situation in Turkey is absolutely no different than Iran, and if you are advocating Turkey to be a democratic model for any country, it is a a laughable matter and a travesty at best. I am sure it sounds perfect for the clueless ears in Washington that are eager to jump into the band wagon to show a model in Islamic Middle East to troubled countries for an easy way out in their think-pink-tank foreign politics. It is a shame to see what she has become of, someone who they ask to get her opinion in Middle East affairs that either she is no expert of or someone who gets a pay-check regularly from Erdogan's AKP party or its supporters here in US.