April 20, 2021
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal In recent weeks, the autocratic Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has moved to ban the pro-Kurdish left-wing People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and jailed the 14
th member of the party’s 56-strong parliamentary caucus. Erdogan’s attack is the latest iteration of repressive, and at times genocidal, anti-Kurdish policies that go back to the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The banning of the HDP will mark the transition of Turkey to outright dictatorship.
Not coincidentally, Turkey has also just quit the Istanbul Convention on violence against women this, as the writer Elif Shafak warns “in a country where three women are killed daily and femicide is a huge crisis. The HDP’s strong pro-feminism contrasts starkly with Erdogan’s crude misogynism.
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Few words are more synonymous with Turkey’s foreign policy than warmongering. Having predominantly promoted a secular, geopolitically introverted Kemalist foreign policy in the twentieth century, with the exception of the 1974 Cypriot intervention, the country has transitioned to an “offensive realist”
weltanschauung under the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Although it is certain that this transformation is estranging Ankara from its NATO allies and aspirations for European Union membership, its overall direction remains unclear. The German Marshall Fund’s policy paper,