Turkish Delight

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Turkish Delight – 7 July, 2001

Well. I don’t know where you are as you read this; I hope it’s somewhere nice. Me, I’m sitting in a Turkish café, overlooking the Turquoise coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The sun is bright, the breeze is cool and the faux-cappuccino is close enough that I’m not complaining. Not far across the sparkling water are several islands, mostly “belonging to” Greece. The oddity that these islands so close to Turkey are in Greece (Cyprus, of course, remains divided since the 1974 coup and invasion) reminds me of how idiotically international boundaries are generally set. In the next few days I’m planning to visit one of the “ghost towns” left empty after the Turkish war of independence, when thousands of people were “traded” between Greece and Turkey in a League of Nations approved version of ethnic cleansing.

This leg of the trip is basically rest and relaxation, and the first week has been great, but my expectation of finding the exotic meeting-place of East and West, the swirling confluence of contrasting cultures … just hasn’t materialized. Maybe it’s due to just coming from a month in India preceded by a few weeks in Thailand, but Istanbul seemed tame and the challenges of travel and communication pretty minor. Turkey, despite its so-called “economic crisis” and largely deserved reputation as being on the authoritarian side of the scale, seems (so far) to be a fairly thriving country with a decent infrastructure and not all that much obvious poverty. At least in Istanbul and the few tourist-heavy areas I’ve seen. One newspaper quoted an academic saying that 40% of the population consists of peasants. Other than lacking what westerners consider modern technology, it’s not clear what kind of economic hardships the peasants are facing and whether the crisis impacts them greatly.

The economic crisis, and what that means, is a hot topic in the newspapers and among people, as is the controversy around the Kurds and Armenian genocide. We had the opportunity to meet with several people involved in some NGOs, one of whom is the head of the largest construction company in Turkey and another the founder of a shelter program for street children (he showed us around his program). Though they had very different levels of defensiveness regarding Turkey’s human rights record, they all talked about the timing of such campaigns (e.g. compensation for Armenian genocide victims, international support for Kurdish independence) being not coincidental, and very much connected to the IMF, European Union and related economic globalization processes. Given what I know of how these things become issues-of-the-day, it’s not hard to imagine there could be an anti-Turkey conspiracy, even though I consider the human rights criticisms well-deserved. What I’m not clear on is what exactly Turkey is doing to earn the wrath of the western powers and financial globalizers. There is quite the mixed politics here, with some socialist parties welcoming globalization and the fundamentalists and ultra-nationalists squawking publicly and calling the finance minister a tool of the IMF, but privately supporting the selling-off of the nation to foreign corporations. This whole globalization process continues to create very confused lines of conflict and alliances. But there is clearly more resistance to the WTO/IMF agenda here, even among government officials, than most places I know of.

Of course, historically, simply existing as an economic/political entity has been enough for other empires to instigate undermining efforts, and Turks seem very conscious of British, Russian and other efforts to break them. I remember about 15-20 years ago (god, am I really that old??), foreign policy magazines talked about Brazil as the big “worry spot,” the “sleeping giant” that the US needed to look out for, primarily because it had the potential to become politically strong, economically independent and a “threat to US interests.” Nowadays, the Brazilian threat is its possible default or repudiation on all those IMF loans-cum-structural-adjustment-programmes pushed on it by the US. So maybe Turkey’s mere existence, coupled with those unfocused challenges to the WTO system, are enough to launch a G7 offensive. I don’t know.

As for the “economic crisis,” I still haven’t come close to figuring that out. As it was described by our Turkish friends, an open dispute among top political leaders – very rare in Turkey – led to a “lack of confidence in the international finance community.” So some $60 billion of foreign capital was yanked out of Turkey’s fledgling stock market, causing a crash, recession and leaving a number of banks insolvent (ala the junk-bond tinged US S&L scandal). So, let me see if I’ve got this so far: pressure from the international finance community to let them buy and sell Turkish assets as they please leads to the creation and expansion of a stock market -- which many Turks still see as silly and official gambling -- then passage of laws making it easier for foreign capital to buy and sell. Then the “modern” system starts to take hold, leading to more pressure to further “modernize” and reduce the controls that Turks are allowed to put on these “investors.” Then some Turks start to complain that the process is going too fast, too far, their country is being sold to foreign corporations and the WTO and IMF seem to be running the country by insisting on laws that favor foreign “investors” at the expense of local interests. Then, nervous about the Turkish resistance to the WTO agenda (or perhaps as punishment), these “investors” pull out of the game they insisted Turkey play, thereby throwing the whole thing into disarray. Then, as a solution (insisting there is no alternative) these same “investors” insist that Turkey go farther faster with the “modernization” process that allowed the crash in the first place. All this without significant change in the “fundamentals” of the Turkish economy, its mode of production or ability to produce adequate food and shelter for its people (Istanbul has considerably less homelessness than Chicago). I must be missing something here, but I can’t say what.

The newspapers, as I said, are full of stories and commentaries about this stuff. Far more public discussion about “globalization” and whether it’s desirable than in the US (where “There Is No Alternative” as Maggie Thatcher insisted). Several apparently mainstream economists and academics were quoted matter-of-factly stating that the US uses the IMF to force Turkey into a debtor/subservient position as part of the larger US-EU struggle for supremacy. Gee, that sounds like the “50 years is Enough” campaign. Now, pundits also talk of people not going into stores much now, so there’s clearly an actual negative impact, but they emphasize the crisis is being driven by the IMF, which insists that Turkey sell its phone company and banks to private owners. The IMF even refused to release the next piece of an already agreed-upon loan (so-called “aid” that has to be paid back with interest) because the IMF didn’t approve of the board of directors named to the newly privatized phone company. Is it any wonder that editorial cartoons show the government having to ask the IMF for permission to go to the bathroom?

As I said, this has mostly been touring around. Istanbul is a great town. I can imagine living here if I learnt the language. The mosques calling the faithful to prayer several times a day the stunning ancient churches-turned-mosques of the old city, relics of the Byzantine Roman Empire intermixed with the Ottoman era, city walls, palaces, underground cisterns … all very cool. It’s always amazing and maybe a bit humbling to see these edifices constructed one or two THOUSAND years ago. I wonder how long the Sears Tower will last.

On the other hand, touring ruins I always think of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” the statue whose grandiose plaque ends with “… look on my works ye mighty and despair.” So many civilizations, empires, conquests that were the center of their known worlds for hundreds or even thousands of years, and what’s left is some stone pillars and fallen archways overgrown by trees and shrubs. Hmmmm. Maybe offers some perspective on impermanence, vulnerability and real power.

The cave dwellings and underground cities of Cappadocia were also impressive. The landscape has a very otherworldly look to it – reminiscent of the eerie, stark beauty of the badlands – and the creativity and determination of the cave diggers is impressive. The official tourist story is that a portion of the landscape was part of a Star Wars set, and though that claim is questionable, I can easily see that this would be a place that would look like an alien, exotic planet.

I also spent a day and a half at Olimpos, a strange but beautiful location that consists entirely of a string of a dozen tourist lodgings – almost all “treehouses” – nestled among some mountains, Lycian ruins and the Mediterranean. It’s all very pleasant, but there really isn’t anything else there. The coolest thing was going to visit the Chimaera, a set of eternal flames spouting out of the ground of Mount Olympus. Early people thought of these flames as the breath of a monster – flames shooting out of the ground all the time in all weather, go figure – and apparently the first Olympic Games lit the Olympic Torch from the Chimaera’s flame. There’s more to the story, of course, but you’ll have to come to the post-trip marathon slide show extravaganza to get it out of me.

I know some of you may have the common fantasy of lying on an enormous, heated marble slab in a dimly lit domed, steamy chamber as a large, swarthy man dressed only in a towel, rubs you down with course material, slathers you with suds, scrubs you down and douses you with hot water. Bucket after bucket. Well friends, eat your hearts out … I’ve been there, done that. The 500 year-old Turkish Bath I went to could have been a scene from Ben Hur (OK, so there was no Turkish bath scene in that movie … you get the point). All marble, lit only by the sun streaming in the small windows set in the domed ceiling, girded by sinks with hot and blessedly cooling running water. And, of course, a bunch of large, swarthy men in towels ready to rub the skin right off you before sudsing you up and rinsing you down. And about 500 years old.

Okay, I’ve gone on long enough, once again. So I’ll stop.

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