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The
Prime Foreign Minister
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After Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's elevation to the seat of the prime
president minister, Ahmet
Davutoğlu is taking over as the prime foreign minister.
Readers should know this column has often hosted Professor Davutoğlu;
sometimes, perhaps, it has been unfair to him.
When the world's foreign policy intelligentsia had the habit of
mentioning his name with euphemisms such as "Turkey's
Kissinger," "champion of Turkey's greatness" and
"always the hero of his own narrative"; here, in this column,
he was one day "Dr. Strangelove," another day, "The Man
Who Made Tomorrow," and another day, "The Man Who Rides the
Thunder." One title was "Dr. Davutoğlu of Turkey or the
[atomic] bomb party," borrowed from Graham Greene's "Dr.
Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party." Once, this column portrayed
Turkey's foreign policy like "a not-so-funny Turkish opera buffa
with the main characters resembling those of [Miguel de] Cervantes's
famous book."
All of which should suffice to make this columnist, to put it mildly,
a not-so-favorite for Mr. Davutoğlu. But his new job could be an
opportunity both for himself and Turkey, not merely because he may now be
distracted from trying tirelessly, and in most cases in the most futile
of ways, to craft a world order that might fulfill his glorious dreams –
his heartfelt tribute to the utopia of his younger years.
All the same, the criticism of Professor Davutoğlu in this column has
never been personal. On the contrary, this columnist knows well enough
that Mr. Davutoğlu is a fine gentleman; an honest, modest, hard-working
man who wants the best for his nation – although not always in the most
realistic way.
His tolerance to dissident opinions (how can I personally not know?)
is at true Western standards of press freedoms and civil liberties, a
quality that puts him planets away from the prime president minister. I hope
Prime Minister Davutoğlu won't be too different from Foreign Minister
Davutoğlu.
Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Davutoğlu is Turkey's first prime
minister – after the late Bülent Ecevit – who is purely free of any
corruption allegations. Mr. Davutoğlu is Mr. Clean. Not even his
opponents have ever claimed he may have been involved in any illicit
activity – even remotely reminiscent of any form of corrupt practice –
including the simplest irregularity worth a few cents. His children, when
they grow up, are also unlikely to become exceptionally successful young
business people. Nor will his relatives make millions from deals with
municipalities controlled by the Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Unfortunately, the fundamentals of Mr. Davutoğlu's foreign policy will
not miraculously metamorphosize into reason from blind ideology.
Previously, Turkey had two foreign ministers, Mssrs. Erdoğan and
Davutoğlu; now it will have three. It is out of the question that the
third man will not be a like-minded ideologue. So, from now, on three
gentlemen, instead of two, will be fighting coup makers in the Middle
East (but not in Thailand) if they go against the Muslim Brotherhood;
hoping to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque in the "Palestinian capital
Jerusalem," depose Bashar al-Assad, maintain a game of pretension
between the neo-Ottomans and the neo-Safavids and, hopefully, working day
and night for the advancement of Turkish Sunni Islamism in
the former Ottoman lands. As always, they will be undecided whether they
want the major western powers in "our Muslim backyard" or not;
it just depends on what the problem in our Muslim backyard is, who the
enemy is and whether we need the western powers' services to defeat the
enemy.
But Mr. Davutoğlu could be Mr. Erdoğan's unwilling gift to Turkey,
especially if he, with his intellectual honesty, reviewed the
applicability of his faith in Turkish Sunni supremacy
into 21st century polity in the former Ottoman lands. Or if he stopped
viewing Turkey's foreign relations with the former Ottoman lands as
Turkey's domestic affairs. Or if he stopped believing he has the holy
mission to correct the "incorrect" flow of history.
Under Mr. Davutoğlu's Foreign Ministry, Turkey earned an international
reputation that "its bark is worse than its bite." As prime
minister, he should work much harder to reverse that line – the prime
president minister permitting.
Burak Bekdil is a columnist for the Ankara-based daily Hürriyet
and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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