The most important revolution to occur in the Mideast has taken place with little notice or understanding in the west. The Muslim world’s uprisings against dictatorship did not begin in Tunisia, but in Turkey.
The first seeds of revolution in Turkey were planted in 2002 when its Justice and Development Party began the long, arduous battle against eight decades of disguised military dictatorship.
To understand the importance of the 12 June Turkish elections, step back for a moment to distant 1960 when I was in high school in Switzerland.
A Turkish classmate named Turgut told me, tears in his eyes, "The generals hanged my daddy!" His father had been a cabinet minister in the government recently overthrown by a military coup.
The 510,000-man Turkish armed forces, NATO’s second biggest after the US, have mounted four military coups since 1950. Turkey’s current constitution, which facilitates military intervention in politics, was written by the military after its 1980 coup.
Ever since the era of national hero turned strongman, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey has been run by its powerful military behind a thin façade of squabbling politicians. In the process, it suffered widescale political violence, Kurdish secessionism, rigged elections, and endless, ruinous financial crises and the constant threat of war with Greece.
Americans always liked to point to pre-2002 Turkey as the ideal Muslim state. "Why can’t those Arabs be more like the sensible Turks?" was a refrain often heard in Washington. Americans chose to ignore, or simply failed to see, that Turkey was an iron-fisted military dictatorship.
Click through for the rest of Margolis's editorial. It's damn good stuff.
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