Global News Journal

from Afghan Journal:

An address for the Taliban in Turkey ?

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has supported a proposal to open an office for the Taliban in a third country such as Turkey.  Such a move could help facilitate talks with the  insurgent group on reconciliation and reintegration of members back into society, and Kabul was happy for Turkey to be a venue for such a process, he said last week, following a trilateral summit involving the presidents of Turkey and Pakistan.

The question is while a legitimate calling card for the Taliban would be a step forward, the insurgent group itself shows no signs yet of stepping out of the shadows, despite the best entreaties of  and some of his European backers. The Taliban remain steadfast in their stand that they won't talk to the Afghan government unless foreign troops leave the country. More so at the present time when U.S. commander General David Petraeus has intensified the battle against them and the Taliban have responded in equal measure.

Perhaps some elements of the Taliban may not be averse to the idea of a parallel engagement to the battlefield but then so amorphous and diffused is the nature of the group that it only complicates the picture further, as The Nation wrote in an editorial.

 Nevertheless, the idea of a representative office for the Taliban is a major step forward in efforts to seek a negotiated settlement of the Afghan conflict, says Strafor's Kamran Bokhari. First, it gives the Taliban the political legitimacy they have been demanding for years, he says. Second with Turkey jumping into the fray, the idea may not be that far fetched. While Pakistan may not be most credible partner in seeking a settlement given its close ties to the Afghan Taliban and other militant groups, Turkey carries enough weight both in the United States and the Islamic world to be able to nudge the different players along.

It has already played a similar role with respect to Iran.

 But of course there is a lot of ground to cover before any of this can materialise including the act of setting up an office for the Taliban. They do not represent an organisation in the classic sense of the word and you can't really tell who speaks for them.

from FaithWorld:

Islam part of Germany, Christianity part of Turkey – Wulff

When German President Christian Wulff recently declared that Islam "belongs to Germany," Christian Democratic  politicians there howled and Muslims living in Germany and Turkey cheered. Now Wulff, on an official visit to Turkey, has told the Turkish parliament that "Christianity too, undoubtedly, belongs to Turkey." This time there was applause in Germany, and  silence from the Turkish deputies listening to him in Ankara on Tuesday.

In both cases, Wulff's words could not have come at a better time.

Germany is in the grip of an emotional debate about Islam and Muslim integration. When Wulff said in his Oct. 3 German Unity Day address that Islam was now part of German society, given the large number (about 4 million) of Muslims living there, it was demographically obvious and politically risky. Several of his fellow Christian Democrats have challenged his view and insisted Germany had a "Judeo-Christian heritage" that Islam did not share. But Wulff, who was considered something of a lightweight for the ceremonial role when he was elected last July,  has taken a clear stand on a political and moral issue -- just like Germans want their head of state to do. He is, as the Financial Times Deutschland entitled its editorial on Wednesday, "Finally A President."

The overwhelmingly Muslim but officially secular state of Turkey is slowly reconsidering the tight restrictions it has long imposed on its tiny Christian minority. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's government has made a small and cautious opening to Christians, allowing religious services at a historic Greek Orthodox monastery and Armenian Orthodox church, allowing an art show at a forcibly closed Orthodox seminary and helping the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch's succession problem with citizenship for foreign prelates.

Despite this, Christians in Turkey -- one of the historical cradles of the faith -- fear their communities are dying out. One of the names often cited at the current Synod on the Middle East at the Vatican is that of Luigi Padovese, the Italian-born Roman Catholic bishop for Anatolia who was murdered at his home in southern Turkey last June.

So it was interesting to see that the Christian minority issue came up at the news conference that Wulff and Turkish President Abdullah Gül held after the German leader's address to parliament. A journalist referred to Wulff's comment that he was also the president of Muslims living in Germany. Gül responded: "We have non-Muslim citizens, we have Christian and Jewish citizens. I am also their president. There is no discrimination. We respect our citizens’ religion and identity. I don’t believe there is a problem here."

from Reuters Investigates:

In case you missed them

Just because it was summer, doesn't mean we weren't busy here at Reuters. Here are a few of our recent special reports that you might have missed.

Tracking Iran's nuclear money trail to Turkey. U.N. correspondent Lou Charbonneau -- who used to cover the IAEA for Reuters --  followed the money to Turkey where an Iranian bank under U.S. and EU sanctions is operating freely. Nice to see the New York Times follow up on this today, and the Washington Post also quizzed Turkey's president about it.

Blue-collar, unemployed and seeing red -- Chicago correspondent James Kelleher went on the road for this story about the long-term unemployed and what that means for Obama and the Democrats at November's midterm elections.

Even though he's been forced to move back in with his parents and has virtually no income, Stevenson opposes Obama's proposal to let some tax cuts for the wealthy, dating back to George W. Bush's presidency, expire at year's end in order to raise revenue and reduce the deficit. 

"How is more people, keeping more of the money they earn, bad for the economy?" he said. "The answer is -- it's not."   

from Tales from the Trail:

U.S. lawmakers wonder, where did our love go? with Turkey

It almost sounded as if U.S. lawmakers felt jilted by Washington's long-time NATO ally Turkey.

"How do we get Turkey back?" demanded Representative Gary Ackerman at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing exploring "Turkey's New Foreign Policy Direction."

"Why is Turkish public opinion ... perhaps one of the most anti-American of any of the countries of the world?" asked the committee's chairman, Representative Howard Berman.

With a panel of experts on Turkey listening, Berman and other lawmakers listed their worries about recent Turkish policy turns on Iran, Israel and the Palestinians.

Concerns about Turkey had hit a new peak with its support of an aid convoy of ships that tried to run the Israeli blockade of the Gaza strip this summer, Berman said.

Turkey's contacts with the Islamist group Hamas -- which won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election -- are "deeply offensive," Berman continued, and show Turkey doesn't respect Washington's list of foreign terrorist organizations (Hamas is on it).

And Turkey effectively dissed the United States again this week when its finance minister said it would boost trade with Iran, while ignoring non-United Nations sanctions, said Berman, the author of recent tough new unilateral U.S. sanctions on Tehran.

Turkey’s EU bid meets another Cyprus roadblock

Negotiating Turkey’s accession to the European Union hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing. But it may be about to get tougher still.

Europeans are already divided over the prospect of inviting a largely Muslim nation into their club of 27 states.  And while some are attracted by Turkey’s huge economic potential, that’s  frequently shadowed by its much-criticised human rights record.

As a result, Ankara’s membership negotiations with Brussels have, perhaps predictably, been slow.

Now a presidential election in northern Cyprus, a sliver of land only twice the size of London, is threatening to wreck any chance of a serious revival in those talks for years.

If opinion polls prove correct, hardline right-wing candidate Dervis Eroglu will oust incumbent Mehmet Ali Talat in the vote this Sunday. Reunification talks between the province, recognised as a state only by Ankara, and the rest of Cyprus could grind to a halt under Eroglu’s leadership.

The conflict started shortly after Britain granted independence to the Mediterranean island in 1960, sparking fighting between its Greek and Turkish communities.

In 1974, a Greek-inspired coup prompted Turkey to invade the island and carve out its own province in the north. Decades of wearisome stop-and-go reunification talks have followed.

Lapland’s part in EU foreign policy

Last weekend, Finland’s foreign minister gathered six of his colleagues and the EU’s foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, in the frozen far reaches of Lapland for two days of talks on the future of European foreign policy.

As informal ministerial gatherings go, it was a rather jolly (if cold) affair, complete with a ‘family photo’ taken with a pair of nervous reindeer, a chance to see the northern lights and activities such as skiing, sledging and snow-mobiling. Some of the ministers even brought along their families.

But as well as a relaxing weekend staying in luxurious cabins 250 km inside the Arctic Circle in the village of Saariselka, what exactly is the point?

Alexander Stubb, Finland’s young and energetic foreign minister, well know for doing triathlons and for his near-permanent grin, says such retreats help foreign ministers get to know each other better and allow them to discuss critical issues without outside pressure. First, they don’t have to worry about reaching hard-headed decisions, and equally they don’t have advisers whispering in their ears or minute-takers holding them to their every word. It’s an open-ended chat among colleagues about topics close to their heart.

France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, and his Italian counterpart, Franco Frattini, certainly backed up that impression as they relaxed in jeans and open-necked shirts and chatted openly with a handful of journalists  also invited along. They went snow-mobiling and celebrated Frattini’s 53rd birthday. 

In terms of discussions, the participants — who also included the foreign ministers of Sweden, Spain, Turkey and Estonia — covered everything from the EU’s role in the world to sanctions on Iran, developments in the Middle East and the setting up of a European diplomatic corps. Over dinner of reindeer steaks and Lapland cloudberries, they sought to put the world to right.

But at the back of their minds, they were also worrying about their own futures.

One dent at a time, Turkey’s nation-state edifice erodes

“Happy is he who calls himself a Turk.”

One of the first things that catches your attention when you drive out of the airport of Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast, is Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s famous phrase engraved on mountain slopes in big white letters.

Bent on building a secular and modern Turkey after World War One, Ataturk carved a united Turkish nation out of the disparate ethnic and religious groups that inhabited the old Ottoman empire — sometimes by forced “Turkification” as was the case with ethnic Kurds.

That once-monolithic nation state is slowly being dented as pluralism becomes an acceptable fact of life in Turkish society.

Turkey’s announcement this week that it is preparing a “democratic opening” for Kurds has raised hopes the EU candidate country might launch bold reforms to end a conflict that has killed 40,000 people and brought pain to many more.

Cynics have been quick to point out the plan, which might include political, cultural and economic measures, is timed to pre-empt a “road map” that jailed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan has said he will announce on Aug. 15.

But regardless of its timing, there is no doubt that Turkey is changing.

How far would Obama have made it in Germany?

What would have happened to Barack Obama if he had been born in Germany?

I had the chance to pose that question to a charismatic young German political leader who is sometimes likened by his supporters to the American President.

Greens party co-chairman Cem Oezdemir, the son of Turkish immigrants, became the first person from an ethnic minority elected to lead a major German party last year — a slogan at the time was “Yes, we Cem“. What might sound rather unspectacular in many industrial countries was actually an epic change in Germany, which until only a decade ago was loath to even acknowledge it was a country of “immigrants” (preferring to call its 7 million foreigners “guest workers”).

So what would have happened to Obama if he had grown up in Germany, a country of 82 million that has 15 million residents with an “immigrant background”?

“I think nowadays Obama would have had great chances for a political career in Germany and pretty much every country in the European Union,” said Oezdemir, a 43-year-old who trained as a teacher before ending up getting picked by the Greens for a seat in parliament in 1994.

Clearly, the tacit message from Oezdemir was that this would not have been the case a decade ago before the country’s archaic citizenship laws were modernised — thanks in part to the efforts of the Greens in power as junior coalition partners with the Social Democrats from 1998 to 2005 — and Germany started to treat its immigrant community as equals rather than “guests” expected to return to their country of origin at some point.

“I’m sure Obama would have ended up in the Greens party if he had grown up in Germany,” added Oezdemir. “And if he were with us here in the Greens I’d be delighted to give him my job as co-chair of the Greens.”

EU vote result adds to Turkey’s membership woes

The results of European Parliament election have caused deep concern in European Union candidate Turkey, where gains made by conservatives and some far-right parties have been read as a  clear win by the “No to Turkey” camp” and thus a blow to Ankara’s already troubled EU membership quest.

Trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, Turkish  Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan dismissed the vote as a “futile effort by those who cannot digest Turkey’s enormity and strategic importance”. He said politicians who vilified Turkey to win votes in the short term would be judged by history.

Erdogan was probably referring to anti-immigration parties  that have openly campaigned against predominantly Muslim Turkey’s accession bid, among them the Dutch Freedom Party of  Geert Wilders who promised that Turkey would not join the  union: “Not in 10 years, not in a million years.”

Turkey, the EU and a love-hate relationship

    French President Nicolas Sarkozy opens a jack-in-the-box  decorated with the EU flag, a boxing glove springs out and  knocks out the teeth of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan .

     “No more empty promises to Turkey,” a snickering Sarkozy  says.  The cartoon in daily Milliyet darkly panders to what most  Turks feel these days are the European Union’s true intentions  towards Turkey’s EU quest — no matter how many obstacles thrown  at its wheels Turkey surmounts on the long and winding road to  Brussels, it will ultimately be denied entry at the gates of the  promised land .

    A survey last weekend by Bahcesehir University in Istanbul  showed that 80 percent of Turks believe that even if Ankara  meets all political and economic requirements for EU accession,  the EU will still not accept it as a member.

    The study was published ahead of the June 4-7 European  Parliament vote, in which Turkey’s bid to join the EU has become  an election issue in some EU countries to the chagrin of the  Turks, always sensitive about their self-image in the West .

     Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and Sarkozy of France  have used the campaign trail to reiterate their opposition to  Turkey’s full EU membership, saying Ankara instead should be  given a “privileged partnership”; Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl  Bildt and his British counterpart David Miliband joined voices  to stress the “strategic interest” of accepting Turkey into the  bloc .

     Election issues can be notoriously short-sighted, but at the  heart of the debate is the very idea of Europe and where it  should draw its borders as it strives to tackle new challenges  such as globalisation, climate change, nuclear proliferation,  energy dependency, the rise of China and other powers or  security .

     Is Turkey — a predominantly Muslim country of 72 million  people with a per capita income of only one-third that of the  27-nation bloc — too poor and too culturally different to fit  into the EU? Do “Little Europeans” from Paris to Berlin, aghast at the  prospect of a EU bordering Iran, Iraq and Syria really want a  fortress and “Christians-only” Europe? Can Europe afford losing Turkey?