Ralph Boulton

Not many people, least of all Germans, will have shared my sentiment; but when the Berlin Wall fell and Checkpoint Charlie, that fortress of barriers, steel gates and watchtowers, was swept away with it, I felt almost as if I was losing old friends.
As a young Reuters correspondent based in East Berlin in the 1980s, I passed almost daily through that conduit between two mutually hostile worlds. Those green-uniformed guardians of world communism may have unnerved Western tourists with their stony mien and intrusive searches. Over three years, though, I got to know them with the superficial familiarity that develops almost inevitably between people whose lives brush so routinely against each other, however lightly. I even gave them secret names; those I liked and those I didn't.
I remember the middle-aged, rather matronly woman I dubbed "Oma" (Gran), who would inquire with a friendly, indulgent smile after my girlfriend in West Berlin. I might tell her about my mother's visit to the "DDR". Did she have a nice time, Herr Boulton? Was the Baltic coast beautiful? When my girl friend's visits became less frequent and then stopped altogether, she was gently solicitous. "Haven't seen Fraeulein K here for a while, Herr Boulton. Doesn't she like us any more?" Doesn't she like you any more was of course the true question; and I answered it, of course. There was something about those 50 second confessionals.
Reading my stasi file a few years later, I saw my comments cooly committed to official paper. Well, I don't hold it against her. It was all very charming; and anyway, I found they had had their own secret name for me. I was "Lupus". As for my mysterious 72-year-old mother, she basked in the code name "Bluete" ("Blossom").

It was the rituals that forged bonds. Driving through the slalom of concrete barriers, surrendering my border pass, waiting to get it back, I would chat with the guards about some football match, the weather, the loud screeching noise emanating from my car. They would raise the barrier, salute crisply and I would be swallowed up into the other world.
The Wall was of course a tragedy. It split families and destroyed lives. Over 130 people were shot dead trying to flee across the Berlin Wall. Would these, my occasional acquaintances, shoot if it came to that? It was a question I asked myself more than once and which I could never really answer. Nor, I suppose, did I want to.
There was the less sympathetic blond haired youth who never smiled, never showed a glimmer of human warmth. I named him, with unashamed malice, "Hitler-Youth". I fancied he would draw his sidearm without hesitation, but maybe I misjudged him. My favourite, though, was always the dark-haired young woman with the comely gap between her front teeth and a flirtatious manner that must surely have violated some regulation or another.
"Gap-tooth" and I had a game. Leaving of an evening, I would slap my passport into her outheld hand and we might spend 10 seconds or so discussing where i was going; to the theatre, to a bar, to a restaurant in a half of the city she would never in her life see; or so we both believed. I might ask her if she wanted to come along, show her two tickets folded in my pass. She would smile and say she would love to but she had to work through the night. Maybe another time. I wonder sometimes what became of her. She presumably had a life beyond Charlie, though I could never imagine it.
What became of some of the others, I found out, to my surprise, a few years later.
I was flying into Berlin from Moscow, where I was working, and arrived at Schoenefeld Airport -- once the main airport of Communist East Germany and now an entry point to the newly-united Germany.
The set-up there was much as I remembered it from the 'Olden Days'. Passengers were channelled towards a narrow, brightly lit passageway where they stood before a cabin with a glass window; behind it a faceless uniformed official. I slipped my passport into the cabin through the gap and waited, looking straight ahead, for the guard to scan my face for a resemblance.
I sensed him look up at me, then back at the passport; then back to me and then to the passport. Why this hesitation? He coughed and leaned towards me.
"Herr Boulton?"
As I looked, he tipped the peak of his cap up to reveal his face. I remember the words exactly.
"Herr Boulton, Ich glaube wir kennen uns schon..." I think we've met before.
Dressed now splendidly in the uniform of the West German Federal Border Guard, sat someone I had last seen in the green uniform and winter shapka fur hat of the East German border guard. I think my astonished reply must have been something like "what are you doing here?"
He smiled mysteriously and signalled me to pass on into the baggage hall. As I waited for my bags, he emerged with two other familiar faces; both, like him, alumni of Charlie, both wearing the uniform of what had not so long ago been the enemy.
It was a brief encounter and one of the strangest of my life. The circumstances in which we had known each other were so peculiar and those of our reunion so utterly unexpected. We shook hands warmly, laughing at the absurdity of it all. Like old frontline soldiers in a phoney war, we had discovered we were old friends

With court charges of corruption against President Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s conservative establishment opens a new front in what amounts to a form of trench warfare between the AK Party and its opponents. One way or another, a showdown of sorts appears to be approaching.

You’re a Turkish patriot. You’re a hardline general, civil servant, judge or a militant nationalist politician. Like everyone you met at the cocktail party last night, you’re convinced Turkey’s AK Party government is turning your country into an Islamist state; backward, oppressive and isolated. 

You despair. The population voted for AK in their millions in 2002. As if that weren’t bad enough, they re-elected them by a landslide five years later, disregarding the dire warnings of the General Staff. Worse still, those ‘modern’ secular middle classes of Istanbul, the mainstay of military influence, joined the religious conservatives of Anatolia in backing AK. They were lulled by the country’s economic success, EU-inspired democratic and financial reforms, and by stability. The West, in its embrace of the AK, is either naïve or hell bent on the end the West always sought – the humiliation or dismemberment of Turkey. Extraordinary how many times, I’ve heard that last one at dinner parties and receptions.

So what can you do, you worried ranks?

When the East Germans rose up against communism in 1953, the Party leaders, after crushing the revolt with Soviet tanks, told the population in no uncertain terms how badly the working classes had failed them. Writer Bertolt Brecht, speaking ironically on behalf of the communist masters, suggested they dissolve the people and elect a new one.

In the absence of that as a realistic option, the course for the Turkish hardliner seems to me to be clear enough. Discredit, undermine, sow division in the AK Party, by whatever channels available – the military, the courts, parliament, the streets.

The Justice and Development Party (AK), after all, is not really a party, at all.

AK emerged more as an ‘emergency coalition’ months before 2002 elections and just as the entire structure of the Turkish party system was collapsing. 

Years of petty personal feuding and coalition squabbling, economic incompetence, corruption and general self-destructive folly had robbed the traditional parties of all credibility.

The cracks in a coalition are always vulnerable to an insistently probing knife.

Many labelled  the Justice and Development Party, which likes to be known by initials that spell out the word for pure and clear,  an Islamist party, pure and simple. Leaders Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul had a well-documented past in the Islamist movement. But it wasn’t that simple. AK rallied together centre-right politicians and economists as well as nationalists and the conservative religious core. Erdogan and Gul declared their Islamist days over and pledged loyalty to secularist state founder Ataturk; a blasphemous crime in itself for some.

AK in 2002 was for many simply the last political home standing, as it remains for many.

For the first time in ages the country was ruled by one parliamentary party, held together firmly by the towering figure of Tayyip Erdogan. It pushed through an IMF programme where so many had failed before, reformed rights legislation, promoted business. The AK people were for many Westerners, diplomats, businessmen and journalists alike, a breath of fresh air. You could talk to them about sensitive subjects like the Kurds, Armenia, Cyprus or clashes with the EU without that haunting feeling they would march out in pique. They were more “pro-Western” in their dealings than an ambivalent military, the civil service or the judiciary of those times.

The sceptics would say they were just pulling the wool over our eyes. For those who feared the worst -- for the general, the judge -- AK provided ample evidence of fickleness from the start. There were the silly things. There was that impromptu prayer meeting in the lobby of the Hilton, local restrictions here and there on drinks licences for restaurants. Then the ill-fated move to lift a ban on Islamic headscarves for women in public buildings.

What has followed is a form of trench warfare, the battle lines being the constitutional strongholds of state.

When AK nominated Gul as president in 2007, the armed forces commander posted a warning on his website that secular democracy was in danger. Surrender of the presidency to an AK leader would remove one of the last checks to its power, allowing it to appoint senior judges and exert influence even over that holy of holies -- the armed forces. Not only did AK publicly defy the General Staff, but the electorate had the audacity to back them with a landslide general election victory soon afterwards.

The months passed. There were mass demonstrations in Istanbul warning of a Sharia state. The battle continued in the courts, where AK narrowly evaded a ban on accusations of Islamist activity. A fine however was imposed, the sense of the accusation may have stuck.

The ‘Ergenekon’ coup plot scandal is seen by some as an attempt to discredit AK enemies and the army as power-hungry and anti-democratic. Hundreds, including senior retired officers, have been arrested over alleged plans for a campaign of demonstrations, bombings and assassinations that would clear the way for a military coup. AK holds up its hands, denying any involvement, and says the judicial process must take its independent course. 

The courts, though, are arguably the second trenchline, following the military’s failure to bring AK to order. The outright military coups of the 20th century, no-one wants to contemplate, not least against a government with broad popular backing. Parliament, where AK faces only a weak and inept opposition, can play no real role; that is, for the moment.

So, what’s new?

A court’s ruling that Gul should face trial in a case dating back over a decade, involving millions of dollars in political funds, opens a new chapter in the book. Whether there is a case or not, the move will probably founder on Gul’s immunity. Supporters will see it as another attempt by the judiciary to persecute AK, sceptics will see a coverup.

The AK Party, Pure and Clear, came to power promising to sweep away the graft and corruption of the ancient regime. So endemic is corruption in public life, this was always going to be a tall order. If clouds of corruption gather over AK, real or illusory, the party’s and Erdogan’s authority could be seriously undermined.

AK must remain AK, to retain its raison d’etre.

The party’s support fell at recent local elections, but it remains hugely popular.

The Islamist accusations, the military warnings, the court cases, the demonstrations, any suggestion of corruption or instability, all whittle away at this emergency coalition. They test its unity, holding it in check until, as the script might run, it can be prized apart or it disintegrates of its own accord. New parties could form, as nervous middle classes desert,   or the old parties, now languishing in disregard, could re-emerge. Parliament might become again a true political battlefield.

For those who would wish away AK, though, whether by attrition or by some cataclysmic events, one poignant question arises in a country still strewn with the political ruins left by the hurricane of 2002: “If not AK, then who? If not Erdogan, then who?”

(Demonstrators shout slogans during a protest at the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern and secular Turkey, in Ankara May 17, 2009. Thousands of anti-government protesters marched in Turkey's capital on Sunday, calling on Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to resign for what they say are violations of the country's secular principles. REUTERS/Umit Bektas (TURKEY CONFLICT POLITICS))

(Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan answers questions during a news conference at the Prime Ministers Chancellery in Warsaw may 14, 2009. REUTERS/Peter Andrews (POLAND POLITICS))

(Turkey's President Abdullah Gul review a honour guard at al-Shaeb presidential palace in Damascus May 15, 2009. REUTERS/ Khaled al-Hariri (SYRIA POLITICS))

So President Medevedev would like to create a "Speakers' Corner" in Central Moscow for Russians to vent their political passions.

"It looks cool," Medvedev told a group of human rights activists. "I need to speak with the Russian authorities and build our very own Hyde Park."
Was this just a rhetorical flourish to impress his guests, a signal that he would loosen the reins that his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, has pulled so tight? Free speech, say the rights activists, is not something Russian authorities have prized, whether on the streets or in the media. Would it, could it, work in Moscow? Where ever would you put it in that crowded, bustling city? Who would go there? What would they do there?
Singaporeans, not know for a culture of dissent and protest, have led the way, setting up their own speakers' corner to protest over economic hardship. Hundreds meet there every Saturday to demand government help. No trouble reported yet.

The London speakers' corner is held up by some as a symbol of British democracy, a place where anyone can stand on a box and say (more or less) whatever he wants without fear. Yes, in their day, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx haunted the place, touting ideas that would have had them dragged away by police in their own countries. Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, wrote in her memoirs that the Bolshevik leaader was most impressed watching speakers "harangue the passing crowds on diverse themes". All jolly stuff and not something he himself encouraged when he set up the dictatorship of the proletariat back at home.

These days though, for the most part, London's speakers' corner is a gathering place for quirky exhibitionists and comedians, political oddballs of left and right and religious eccentrics of all ilks warning sinful tourists of hell and damnation. The occasional thoughtful soul will read through Shakespeare's sonnets or expound the virtues of a forgotten philosopher. Heckling seems to be a central part of the fun. A policeman may be at hand in case things turn nasty, but they rarely do.

Possibly, the spot in the north-east corner of Hyde Park was chosen for its closeness to Tyburn gallows where once the condemned would make their last declarations. The Moscow equivalent to Tyburn, I suppose, would be Red Square, where villains were put to death by the axe – though, in the Russian tradition, without those last words. Perhaps, then, Moscow's Speakers' Corner might fit nicely nearby at Alexandrov Gardens, at the Kremlin Walls. Arguably, though, a bit too close to
Medvedev's seat of power. My proposal would be a few hundred metres up Tver Avenue, on Pushkin Square where the Soviet Union once maintained its own bizarre and macabre form of speakers' corner. Perhaps I should call it the hat-takers-offers corner.

Every Human Rights Day, a keen crowd of journalists and plain-clothes KGB officers would gather in the winter cold around the perimeter of the square named after the great liberal poet Alexander Pushkin. As the hour of eleven approached, a tense hush would descend. A single figure would eventually appear, walk to the centre of the square, stand for a moment, and then take his hat (usually a rabbit-skin ‘shapka’) off; a symbolic protest against the suppression of human rights in the communist state.

In an instant, the KGB officers would swoop down upon him, drag him across the square, bundle him into a van and speed him off to the Lubyanka prison. A few minutes would pass and a second dissident would arrive, take off his hat and stand to attention before being likewise borne away by the forces of order. And so it went on.

Pity though the 'innocent' citizen who strayed unwittingly onto the square on that December day, carrying perhaps a magazine or a string bag of potatoes, and found himself suddenly the focus of this hawkeyed gathering. He would break his step and look around, of course, in wonder at his sudden and unexplained celebrity. Me?
That was more enough. Hat or no hat, he followed the rest, bundled into the van and away. It happened, sadly.

Finally, I ask myself who would pitch up at Moscow's speakers’ corner and in what frame of mind? Memories of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the coups, the civil wars, the anger and the hardship, are still fresh. Economic crisis raises fears of another plunge into uncertainty and the eternal search continues. Kto Vinovat? Who is to blame?

What makes London's Speakers' Corner possible, amid all the mockery and sometimes quite pernicious views, is that most people just don't take it seriously. They laugh, make fun. There may be anger but it knows its bounds. People throw up their hands and walk away, triumphant or humiliated before their peers.

How would Speakers' Corner take root in Russian soil? Would liberal literati feast on Pushkin and Gogol, while the preachers invoke the fires of hell? Would it become a platform for Muscovites nursing private grievances against uncaring state institutions, the police, big business, the President? Could a Chechen malcontent plant his flag alongside angry nationalists and red-banner waving Stalinists?
Are Russians ready yet to laugh at profanity?

"God preserve us from the Russian Uprising, senseless and merciless."

The line from poet Alexander Pushkin was quoted to me often by Russians in the dark days of the early 1990s when the Motherland had fallen from grace, communism was collapsing and millions were pitched into unemployment and poverty. Romantic souls, bleary-eyed, would tell me how Russians were born to suffer: to suffer the piercing winter frosts of a vast land, the predations of war and invasion, the shortages, the harshness of their masters. The Russian would suffer patiently, silently; that is, until he could take no more.

A recent poll suggested nearly a quarter of Russians would consider joining protests against falling living standards. Sixty percent said they would regard protesters with respect or understanding. So, could the popularity of tandem rulers Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev wane, with jobs lost, wages unpaid, factories run down?

President Medvedev, on a videoblog marking his first anniversary as president, appealed to Russians to keep their faith in the future. Putin struck a more bellicose note, warning opposition critics not to consider exploiting the economic crisis to challenge his government and stir discontent.

Certainly, the crisis bites with a peculiar ferocity in some areas of Russia. Decades of Soviet development left some whole cities almost entirely reliant on single factories for employment and social services. Think of Motor City Detroit and triple the problem. Tolyatti was born to its car factory, Seltso lives by a munitions plant, Magnitogorsk is fed by a smoking behemoth of a steelworks that was the pride of Soviet power.

Russian protests so far have been small and limited largely to the major cities of Moscow and St Petersburg, while Greece has seen riots and Iceland the toppling of a government. Police have tended to act vigorously. In Vladivostok, 6,000 Km (3,750 miles) from Moscow, on the Pacific coast, riot police were flown in to break up an unsanctioned rally in December against new tariffs threatening a trade in imported second hand Japanese cars. Regional interests clashed dramatically here.

 The duties, a big blow to the Vladivostok economy, were imposed to offer some protection to the car workers of Tolyatti. Anger towards Moscow ran high but street protests ebbed.

Looking back over recent history, there’s little evidence of change being driven by the streets. Mikhail Gorbachev set about reforming the Soviet Union and the Communist Party ‘from above’. A hardliner coup to halt that reform failed not because of mass demonstrations or riots but largely because the putsch leaders simply lacked authority with the security services and and failed to mobilise a sclerotic machinery of government.

I remember that coup leader’s hands shaking uncontrollably as he shuffled documents at a news conference, recall his fellow conspirator, the prime minister, who fell ill at the height of the putsch, and the interior minister who sat on his bed and shot himself in the head. Yes, some brave people took to the streets, Boris Yeltsin stood atop a tank and barked defiance to the crowd, but the collapse was at the top.

Yeltsin pushed Gorbachev aside as the country and the Party crumbled. Putin, in turn, showed Yeltsin the door as the new century arrived, restoring order in a country threatened by regional separatism and economic decline.

In the post-Soviet era, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and Georgia’s Rose Revolution were never emulated on the streets of Russia.

Pushkin’s “Russian Uprising” was an 18th century peasant revolt focused on the Ural and Volga regions led by Yemelian Pugachev, a pretender to the throne of Tsarina Catherine the Great -– a rebellion crushed with equal brutality. The memory of Pugachev is a distant one, but there are more recent events, less dramatic in scale that scar the Russian landscape.

One city name stands alone as a reminder to Russia’s leaders as they weigh the dangers of social unrest in the months ahead: Novocherkassk.

In June, 1962, workers at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Factory, furious about food shortages, wage cuts and dismal working conditions, declared a strike. Moscow, wary of any spread in the unrest, ordered tanks into the town. Crowds marched on the Communist Party headquarters to present their demands. Militants broke away and stormed the local militia headquarters. Rioting swept Novocherkassk, a city situated close to the historic heartland of the cossacks Pugachev drew on for his rebellion. Moscow ordered troops to act, and shots were fired into the crowd. Dozens, including women and children, were killed, their bodies buried secretly at night by the security services.

Russian leaders, ensconced in the Kremlin, had failed to recognise the depth of feeling and suffering in the distant provinces and were quickly overwhelmed. Authorities in Novocherkassk under pressure from Moscow acted clumsily, in panic, to restore order.

The political perils for Russia’s leaders lurk today, as they did in the past, in the more remote provinces of a vast country spanning 11 time zones and countless nationalities from the Polish border to Vladivostok in the Far East.

Some in the poorest regions have little more they can lose as the crisis grips. They may be joined in their anger by a middle class, only just emerging, only just adapting to the pleasures of wealth now snatched from them.

Putin made clear the importance he gives to control over the regions when, as one of the first acts of his presidency, he brought them directly under his appointees. According to one newspaper report, the head of Russia's oil producing Bashkortostan region may leave his post within weeks, the most powerful casualty yet in a clear-out of regional leaders analysts have linked to Kremlin concern over possible unrest.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union has its lessons for the Russian Federation. The tensions of the coming months may play out less on the streets than quietly between Moscow and the power elites of the struggling regions – from the unruly north Caucasus to the Arctic north, from the Siberian oilfields to the distant Far East.

In the best of times, Russia is a hard country to hold together.

The following blog was contributed by Humeyra Pamuk:

It was like the explosion of a thousand fireworks in the night sky over Istanbul.

When Tayyip Erdogan returned home after publicly haranguing Israel’s President over the Gaza offensive, supporters hurried to praise the Turkish Prime Minister’s pointed language (“I know very well how you …killed children on the beaches”). Turkey's Western-oriented elite – the so-called White Turks – seemed to balk at the same direct and undiplomatic flourishes.
This cascade of emotion illuminated the unease White Turks may still feel about Erdogan, six years after his election. Many have suspended a suspicion that, for all his denials, as a child of political Islam what he seeks is a different, religious state, ‘another Turkey’. The clash with Shimon Peres, the direct language (even if the Israeli President had himself been emotional in lecturing Erdogan with wagging finger) and the scenes of jubilation when crowds welcomed him back at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport seem to have given some pause for thought.
Commentators less sympathetic to Erdogan examined the events in detail over the weekend.
Many rallied against what they have described as an insult to their prime minister, and thus to their national pride; but their disagreement over Erdogan’s “ways” highlighted the divisions within the society.
They pondered the anatomy of anger and the psychology behind the words of a man renowned for his distaste for being publicly criticised. They asked, and then answered, their own questions on why a prime minister – particularly one who has stepped up to the role of mediator in the Middle East at a very critical time – should storm out of an international panel discussion while thousands watched. His criticism of Israel may have been shared by many Turks but it was not so much what he said. It was how he said it.
They played down the enthusiasm of the crowd that welcomed him back from the World Economic Forum in Davos, waving Turkish and Palestinian flags, chanting, "Turkey is proud of you".
>
Not that Erdogan's actions found no resonance in the mainstream press.
"The prime minister was right", ran the headline of veteran commentator Fikret Bila's column in Milliyet. Bila argued the Israeli President's manner was provocative and aggressive, repeatedly asking Erdogan how he would feel if rockets fell daily on Istanbul. If Erdogan had not reacted, then he would be open to criticism. "Israel can do whatever it wants, with the wind of the U.S. at its back. Noone reacts or can react, noone can touch Israel. Someone had to do it."
Hurriyet columnist Oktay Eksi dismissed the admiration Erdogan enjoys on what he calls “The Street", writing:
”They will applaud you today, because they act with "emotion" rather than reason. But for the very same reasons they could just dump you the next day."
"We understand why no diplomats come out of Kasimpasa" was the headline over commentator Semih Idiz’s more gentle treatment in Milliyet daily. Kasimpasa is the neighbourhood where Erdogan grew up – a working class part of Istanbul known for a culture of bravado.
Erdogan made no apology for the 'rough edges' that many supporters see as refreshing directness.
"I don't speak the language that some retired diplomats understand. I don't come from a diplomatic background, I come from politics. I don't know the ways, traditions of those diplomats, especially the ‘mon-chers’,” he said, slipping into a mocking Turkish- French that was taken amiss by some of Turkey’s older generation of diplomats.
“And I would not want to know."
Erdogan, without diplomatic niceties, has pushed Turkey’s campaign for EU membership, although entry remains a distant prospect. He has won some respect among White Turks for economic progress. But the fear of the Other Turkey – a Turkey more conservative, with its roots in Anatolia rather than the boulevards of Istanbul -- remains, embodied for some by the crowd at Ataturk Airport. The military, above all, see him as a possible danger to secular government and has tried to have his party banned for Islamist activity.
Millions will vote across Anatolia in municipal elections in March when the popularity of Erdogan, re-elected with a landslide in 2007, five years after he first came to power, will be put to the test.
A former Islamist espousing a European future for Turkey, Erdogan marks a break from the traditional secularist parties who had governed the country for decades and collapsed in 2002 polls as voters deserted them. Supporters saw him as straddling the social divides in Turkey. Many in the secularist middle classes, whatever their reservations, contributed their vote in confirming him in power with increased support in 2007.
Are they now taking fright over the man from Kasimpasa? Are the fault lines showing in the secular state created eight decades ago out of the theocratic Ottoman Empire? Or are the two Turkeys, the White and the long silent Brown Turks, simply learning to come to terms with each other?
Turks will be looking to the March elections for some clue.

The following piece is written by Turkey correspondent Ibon Villelabeitia:

A new and intimate documentary on Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the
venerated soldier-statesman who founded modern Turkey after
World War One, has sparked controversy in this European Union
candidate country at a time of national self-absorption.

"Mustafa", which opened on Oct. 29 on the 85th anniversary
of the foundation of the republic, has spawned a lively debate
in newspapers and television shows on the merits of the film.

Is it appropriate to depict Turkey's national hero as a
flawed man who drank heavily and suffered from bouts of
loneliness? Could he be called a dictator? Did he talk about an
autonomous land for the Kurds?

An anti-smoking group has complained that the movie sets a
bad example for the youth because Ataturk is seen smoking one
cigarette after another -- 3 1/2 packs a day we are told.

Calls for a boycott from hard-line "Kemalists" have been
mixed with praise for bringing "Ataturk down from a pedestal".

Westerners visiting or living in Turkey are always mystified
by the almost religious reverence Turks feel for Ataturk, who
laid down the strict secular principles of today's Turkey.

His peering blue eyes and sage-like composure tower over
everyday life here. Banners and portraits of Ataturk, adorn the
walls of government offices, barbers and kebab stores across
this deeply nationalistic nation.

Our 4-year-old son, born to an American mother and a Basque
father, came home from school the other day with the white-and-
red colours of the Turkish flag painted on his cheeks, a banner
of Ataturk in one of his hands.

- "Who is that gentleman?" I asked.

- "Well, Ataturk the Father of the Turks", he replied,
dutifully repeating what children here are taught by teachers,
before rushing to the living room to play with his Scooby-Doo
castle.

Personality cult is no exclusive preserve of Turks,
but the omnipresence of Ataturk has no parallels today in any other
European country.

Is Turkey -- where profound social changes, EU-inspired
reforms and globalisation are shaking the pillars of Ataturk's
autocratic state -- reassessing the legacy of its founder?

Ataturk is still deeply respected by most Turks, as a visit
to his mausoleum in Ankara shows. Young and old, urban and
rural, covered and uncovered women line up to visit the
Anitkabir in awe -- a pilgrimage to a secular Lourdes of sorts,
as a Turkish friend defined it to me.

Ataturk is universally credited for giving women the right
to vote, modernising the education system and removing religion
from public life in order to bring up levels of social and
cultural development on par with Europe.

But the strict tenets of Kemalism -- secularism, statism
and nationalism -- are under strain 70 years after his death.

A rising and religious-minded middle class from the Anatolian
heartland is moving to positions of power, and with it,
redefining notions of Islam, secularism and individual rights.

Critics say Ataturk has been taken hostage by an entrenched
military, judiciary and state bureaucracy, which have turned his
legacy into dogma to defend the status quo. Those who claim to
defend Ataturk’s legacy more fervently are, ironically, the same
who are blocking his fulfilment of a modern Turkey, they say.

Can Dundar, a 44-year-old film-maker with impeccable republican credentials and who calls himself an Ataturk follower, said his goal was to present a more human Ataturk to better understand his legacy.

"Ataturk said once his greatest achievement was to bring
sovereignty to earth instead of a sovereignty stemming from a
book which is believed to come from the sky, refering to the
Quran," Dundar said. "I hope this film helps to bring him down
to the earth again."

I'd almost forgotten he was there, in my home. Then came the global economic crisis with its visions of apocalypse, and he caught my eye again, this fiery orator, this ruthless revolutionary killer, the scourge of global capitalism.

His is the first face -- hornrimmed glasses, goatee beard -- guests might see as I usher them into my living room. My treasured, framed photograph of Lev Davidovich Trotsky
posing like some uneasy tourist, cap in hand, before a spreading palm tree in Sochi, commands pride of place. Not that I admire the man.

It was more the circumstances that delivered him to me.

I was working in Moscow, the Soviet Union was collapsing around me. The High and Mighty, Politburo members, so long distant, mysterious figures, were suddenly skittled from power and revealed in once undreamt-of meetings as the banalities most were. While the flesh was discredited, dusty old documents and photographs that had slept disregarded in secret Soviet archives took on a throbbing vitality as archive doors opened to me.

Yellowed paper, tragic, hand-annotated testimonies of men about to be slaughtered, the cruel scribbled jests of their executioners, came alive in my hands; then there was Lev Davidovich's holiday snap, taken months before he was driven into exile and then bludgeoned to death with an ice axe by one of Stalin's henchmen. Documents can have a strange power.

Those were the heady days when it was easy to declare the death of socialism, the final triumph of capitalism. New free market economies were set up with a missionary zeal throughout the old Soviet Empire and beyond, from Prague to Beijing. Throughout the world, capitalism was being honed, refined, its brutal bears and wild bulls tamed. A new kind of capitalism.

Finance houses found new ways to handle credit, raise money and spread risk. Markets melded together in the revolutionary global movement my Russian lodger had sought a century ago to make his own.

Now, Trotsky would have known nothing of derivatives, leveraging, swap spreads, abusive shorting or securitisation -- the whole scaffold of advanced instruments mounted with such faith by those kings of finance. That stony visage, staring into the camera, would have broken into a smile though at the very notion of capitalism uniting the world and then collapsing, as he would see it, under the weight of own contradictions.

The American government takes over (the word 'nationalise' is pointedly not uttered) mighty finance houses Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, bails out a huge insurance company, and offers loans in return for equity. Most recently the Bush administration has sent Congress a $700-billion plan to purchase bad mortgage debt from financial institutions. One by one the heads roll, the state stake billows. Criticism abounds.

"The failure of each large institution set off a search for who might be the next target," wrote Harold James, on Sept 17, in the Financial Times.

At stake of course is not just the American economy but the global system itself. True, these are not the expropriations in the name of the proletariat that the bloody Red Army chief promoted as he criss-crossed Russia on his red-flag-bedecked armoured train.

But he had always said the world communist revolution could triumph only if it once succeeded among the advanced capitalist countries -- and it had to be global.

Lev Davidovich Trotsky, hanging there patiently over the jardiniere, might be hoping for too much, if he expects a global collapse to stir a worldwide uprising in the name of communism.

But there is a new glint in his eye.

The fear in recent days has been palpable in the business area of London's Canary Wharf where I now work -- far from the old home of world socialism.

"Bankers, like everyone else, like to suck on a comfort blanket. In the middle of any episode of banking weakness or financial turmoil their oft-repeated claim is that they have learnt the right lessons from the Great Depression," James wrote. "It became an article of faith that a catastrophe of that magnitude could not occur again."

It is for the architects of modern economic capitalism to design the failsafe structure that keeps the dogs of chaos at bay.

In the meantime, I glance occasionally at Lev Davidovich, standing before that palm tree in his collarless tunic and leather jackboots. The very suggestion of chaos will make any parent think anxiously of the world his children will grow up in. Lev Davidovich has the look of a man ready to wait.

"I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow," he wrote in his autobiography. "Mere impatience will not expedite their change."

  Following the national soccer team to a foreign country is usually a safe enough bet for any national leader. Photographs of the president or premier smiling and waving, the local colour, the national flags all play well at home; a few platitudes to charm the local press and a  handshake. Simple, harmless political fun.                                                                                                                                                               

When Turkish President Abdullah Gul visits Yerevan this weekend for Turkey's World Cup qualifier against Armenia, however, there will be nothing simple about it.

    For the two countries, divided over a wartime slaughter that occurred early in the last century, it will be a historic moment, fraught with perils.

      For many Armenians, Gul's presence will be an act of sheer effrontery by a state they accuse of an act of genocide against the Armenian people; an act of savagery by the old, collapsing Ottoman Empire for which they demand an apology and redress.

   For many nationalist Turks, his unprecedented venture, the first visit to Armenia by a Turkish leader, borders on betrayal of their country which they say committed no genocide. Hundreds of thousands, Turks and Armenians alike, they argue, died in the fierce fighting  that consumed the region. Opposition leader Deniz Baykal gave a taste of that mood, remarking sarcastically that Gul should lay a wreath at the Yerevan genocide monument. 

     Recklesness or statesmanship? Whichever it is,  if it is either,  it is arguably an act of political courage -- as was the invitation issued by Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan. Gul might have left well alone as generations of Turkish leaders have done before him. Few in Turkey or Armenia, would have raised an eyebrow.

     There may well be anti-Turkish demonstrations in Yerevan and rumblings at home. Gul, a naturally mild-mannered man, must watch his words and his body language. Maybe soccer diplomacy could break the ice between Armenia and Turkey in the same way ping-pong diplomacy launched relations between the United States and Communist China.

     Gul's visit to Armenia is the latest in a string of Turkish foreign policy interventions around his country's troubled border areas, involving Syria, Iran, Israel, Iraq and more recently Georgia. Gul and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan might be seen as pandering to a foreign policy fantasy nurtured by Washington and Brussels of a Turkey building bridges between the West and the Arab world, helping secure the energy routes of the Caucasus and healing the wound of Cyprus; but Ankara is pursuing its own vested interests. While the Turkish economy may prosper in Istanbul or central Anatolia, the country's east remains steeped in poverty.

    Why? Look around.

    Eastern Turkey is caught, effectively, in a dead end, surrounded  by closed or virtually closed borders and weak neighbouring economies. Armenia is one such neighbour, but an important one.

     A landlocked country still emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Union, Armenia also suffers from a closed border with its huge western neighbour.

    The argument about whether or not the events of the last century were an act of systematic killing, a genocide,  will continue with a passion.

    The idea that governments write history or interpret it is not one that sits easily with me. I've lived in countries where the history books are written by the government or the Party.

   The Turks have compromised themselves over decades on this count by prosecuting historians or journalists who dare to entertain the question of whether there was genocide; but things in Turkey are changing. The country is opening, if not quickly enough for some.

    Armenians might argue that the killing in what is today eastern Turkey is not history but very much a modern event for families driven into exile and living with the consequences. Some of those exile families, from Paris to Los Angeles, are among the most vocal proponents of diplomatic action against Turkey.

     Soccer matches can be emotional occasions. Turkish and Armenian colours will vie for attention. Hopefully, the emotion this time will be confined largely to the action on the pitch, but politics will be foremost in many people's minds, within and beyond the borders of Turkey and Armenia.

    A risky and courageous political act by Gul or a move long overdue for both Turkey and Armenia? Much depends on what comes after the final whistle. Both sides are showing good will. The Armenians, for instance, are removing from the emblems on their kit the image of Mount Ararat,  a mountain now in Turkey but closely linked to Armenian culture and history.

    As Turkish national coach Fatih Terim said on Tuesday, the team is going to Yervan ‘to play a game and not to fight a war'. 

    They are 21st century barbarians, thugs, thieves, fascist hordes bent on killing, sacking Georgian cities, burning treasured forests, humiliating and crushing a proud people. "I see," said President Mikheil Saakashvili, "evil in their eyes."

    Such is the picture of Russians painted by Georgia's leaders over the last two weeks of war and uneasy ceasefire. Russia, of course, has been far from courteous about Georgia. You have to wonder, though, what effect this deluge of vitriol might have on historically good relations between 'ordinary' Georgians and Russians living in Tbilisi. In the southern Caucasus, a volatile patchwork of ethnic groups, the Georgian capital has been a relatively harmonious place through two centuries of imperial Russian rule, Soviet mastery and then the turbulent years since independence. Georgians, Russians, Azeris, Jews, Armenians all called Tbilisi home, their common tongue Russian.

    How soon can fury vented on a state level turn the minds of neighbours?

   There is an almost unreal calm these summer evenings on the tree-lined Rustaveli Avenue, elegantly restored from the blackened ruins I saw here after a civil war in 1992. Old people, young couples sit on lines of benches facing each other, reading books, chatting, flirting.

    The promenaders of Rustaveli may not have been touched directly by the bitterness of war, like fellow citizens around the town of Gori, but most are angry about "Putin's invasion".

    "Yes, I was shocked when we heard bombs, even here in Tbilisi. I have so many Russian friends, even Russian relatives. We've talked about it," says David, a young man in black tee-shirt and jeans. "They feel as bad about it as we do. It's awkward for them. Should I hold it against them? Of course not."

    Lali Moroshkina, a Russian and head of an NGO that works on ethnic minority problems, says about 50 Russians came today to her office to sign a protest letter over the invasion. "Ethnic Russians haven't had any major problems so far, maybe some minor problems and only in the town of Gori."

   David and Lali seem to reflect majority opinion here, but there are others. Sveta, a Georgian with a Russian first name, seems more distraught about how things could develop than seized of any real resentment of her Russian neighbours; but she
wonders.

    "I am afraid that after all this time, all these years, Russia could have spoiled things for us," she says. "My friends all are angry about the Russians. No Georgian will go up to a Russian and insult him or abuse him. We're not like that. But there is this feeling. Give it time and it will go away, I hope."

    Russians were by far the largest minority population in Georgia during Soviet rule. Any resentment felt by Georgians against Moscow was directed largely against the central 'apparat', the Communist Party. Even that was laced with a certain irony. Many Georgians took leading positions in the Party; not least, of course, Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. Former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze is a more recent example. One popular Georgian joke has Georgians lamenting the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    "Georgia has lost a useful colony."

    The old Soviet communist slogan of "Druzhba Narodov" -- friendship of the peoples -- may have rung falsely in many areas of the old Union, attended as it was by forced transportations and persecutions of ethnic groups; but it was more or less reality in Tbilisi.

    Many Russians left Georgia during the 1990s, to escape civil war, deprivation and stirrings of nationalist militancy under first president Zviad Gamsakhurdia. But many remain, married to Georgians or simply preferring Georgia's lighter, sunnier
climes. The official figure of a 3 percent share of the population doesn't reflect the true influence of Russian culture here.

    "I grew up in Soviet times. I went to Moscow so often. I loved the girls," says Gyul, a schoolteacher. "Russia is part of me. How can that change?"

    The prevailing feeling seems one of shock that precludes any real, balanced conclusions yet about what has befallen Georgia.

    "The town's half-empty now, So many people are away at their country houses, on holiday," says Gyul.  "When everyone gets back in September, then is the time for taking stock. Then I'll be talking about it with my Russian friends. We will be looking
into each other's souls."

   "(It) is a very sensitive topic, so sensitive it can break many people's hearts, and so delicate it can destroy many Mujahideens' dreams."

    A senior Jihadi offers us an unusually frank insight into problems of recruiting dedicated and disciplined foreign fighters to battle U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan.

    The stone in the heart of Ebu Yasir el-Turki is the Turkish Jihadi who leaves his home in Adana, Konya or Gaziantep to fight alongside the Taliban and militant Muslim brothers hailing from Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, or Europe. The portrait he paints, -- with evident embarassment, for he appears to be a Turk himself -- is of 'fairweather Jihadis'  seeking swift, easy glory and a quick return home, there to live comfortably off richly embroidered stories of derring-do.

    "At the moment, in the Jihadist communities in Afghanistan,  Turks are not very valued. They are considered guests who have come on a vacation, with exceptions," Yasir, of the guerrilla Islamic Jihad Union, says in an interview posted on the Turkish Jihadist website Sehadet Vakti (Time for Martyrdom) and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group.

    "The Turks here are so famous that they are given as examples in many conversations. They say 'do not do as the Turks do' or 'do not be as Turks are'... Believe me, no community wants to accept these Turkish Mujahideen." 

   Why, then, this washing of dirty linen in the very public realm of cyberspace? Yasir clearly  sees a broader problem for the Mujahideen.

    Too many Turkish volunteers, he says, are moved by emotion rather than genuine religious zeal. They can be weak people, who choose jihad as an escape from social and private problems. Watching a video about Jihad and martyrdom in the comfort of an air-conditioned flat in Turkey is one thing.

    "But it is different here. Sometimes they have to stay in a room ... for months, when it is hot and cold."                                           

   They come saying they will stay for a year, seeking death and revenge against Western occupiers, but passions subside and many leave after only a few months.  Security experts and diplomats in Kabul talk of an increased level of foreign fighters this year; most of all Pakistanis, but after that Chechens, Uzbeks, Arabs and Turks. The Afghan intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, said this week they had caught a Turk, a Saudi and a Kuwaiti in Paktia province, close to the Pakistani border.                                                                                       

Yasir makes some revealing observations about his Turkish brethren and by implication, about Turkey.

    "Praise be unto Allah, we started to improve them, but it is very difficult. Every Turkish brother comes as a commander and they do not like being under (anyone's) command because they were brought up in a democratic environment. They feel the need to express their ideas on every subject," he said.

    Talk of Jihad and sacrifice turn to a longing for the comforts of home. The Turk would have grown up in a secular order and, Yasir seems to say, the mantle of the Jihadist hangs ill about his shoulders. He lacks also the fear of persecution when he returns that helps motivate the Egyptian, the Uzbek or the Chechen.

     "The excuses are standard."

    If he is married, he has to return to sort out his wife's problems, if single, he must go back to marry, or he is depressed or he argues with camp instructors. "We are fighting here, not playing games," the Turks are told. "This is not a tourist facility for you to be able to say 'I decided I am leaving.' Is Allah's religion so simple for you?"

    The faint of heart parry his rebukes, referring back to early jihads that, they say, lasted only four months. "May Allah reclaim these brothers," says Yasir.

    So, they go.

    This, for the Jihadis back in Afghanistan, is where the problems begin. Back in Turkey, the failed Mujahideen assumes the role of returning hero, collecting money, rallying admirers and then sending them off to Afghanistan. There they pitch up, unbidden and unwanted. What, Yasir asks, do we do with them then?

    "Here our purpose is not to disparage anyone," says Yasir. "It is to show people their mistakes."

    The Turks, says Yasir, have had their distinguished fighters and martyrs, especially in the early years after the U.S.-led invasion when he says they numbered about 2,000. Now he estimates there are about 150 Turkish Jihadi though there is no way of verifying this. He talks with some reverence of Cuneyt Cifti, known by the codename Saad Ebu Furkan, who in March drove a truck packed with explosives into an Afghan and allied army compound, killing two allied soldiers and two Afghan civilians.

      Though a Turk by family background, Cifti grew up largely in Germany.

    Yasir acknowledges the hardship in the mountains and on the plains of Afghanistan. The number of Mujahideen who hold out for five years is small, "not more than the fingers on one hand"; but those who come should agree to stay for at least one year and should come out of religious conviction and not emotion.

    "If we do it, we should do it right, or it might be better to stay where we are and not go to the battlefields ... (and)  create problems for the Mujahideen."