Riot police looked on from the fringes as crowds mingled late into the night, some protesters chanting and dancing, others applauding a concert pianist who took up residence with a grand piano in the middle of the square.
From the same article: “Erdogan has accused foreign forces, international media and market speculators of stoking conflict and trying to undermine the economy of the only largely Muslim NATO state.”
Setting aside that mouthful I call “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy (FBPS)”, which may deal too much with motivation and personality and too little with “cognitive style” I’m starting to think autocrats internally muddled, unable to deal with criticism, open processes — including for Taksim Square specifically, urban development and land use planning — and the possibility that they themselves are a little bit a part of larger political and social issues.
American analog – Erdogan / Taksim: Nixon / Woodstock.
The Turkish youth are okay, and perhaps so is the state’s middle class.
“Any one of these men picked by Khamenei will execute his orders,” the 80-year-old said in an interview in his house near Paris, where he has been exiled since 1981.
“The Republic is erasing itself in the face of the Leader.”
The article will go on to answer the question it has posed.
It seems there are nuts and bolts issues to be tackled by an Iranian president — inflation and unemployment, at least — but power ultimately resides with Ayatollah Khamenei by divine right.
Perhaps its that “act cleverly” part that will spur some Iranians more concerned with inflation and unemployment to vote for other than Velayati.
Reporters Without Borders condemns an increase in the Iranian government’s harassment of Iranian journalists in the final days before the 14 June presidential election and the restrictions imposed on the few foreign journalists allowed into the country to cover it.
Manipulating elections neither fair nor free nor open, the Grand Peacock has perhaps exerted sufficient control over elections — by approving only a narrowed field of candidates and by managing the “Iran Curtain” to slow Internet traffic and reduce domestic and foreign media criticism and impact, which management seems to have included already the arrests of two domestic journalists (Omid Abdolvahabi and Hesamaldin Eslamlo, according to the RWB page cited) — to keep himself feeling good about himself.
Reporters Without Borders goes on to note, “Today is the second anniversary of Iran-e-Farda journalist Hoda Saber’s death in detention, 11 days after journalist and women’s rights activist Haleh Sahabi died as a result of the beating she received at her father’s funeral. No one has been arrested or tried for either of these deaths.”
In the atmosphere of such governance and unsolved political crime, one might ask Persians who intend to vote whether they mean to express preference at the polling stations or general approval of their country’s state of affairs.
“We were patient, we will be patient, but there is an end to patience, and those who play politics by hiding behind the protesters should first learn what politics means,” Erdogan said.
Protesters have accused Erdogan of becoming authoritarian during his 10 years in power and attempting to impose the Islamization of Turkey, which is currently governed by secular laws. Erdogan brushed off the accusations, calling himself a “servant” of his people.
For his post-Kamalist autocratic methods, Erdogan makes an easy foil for the political opposition not only in Turkey but, opposite NATO (over Syria, lately), in Russia too.
As popular demonstrations attract everyone with a political bone to pick — or youthful and wild energy to expend — they can get out of hand to the point where authority (of any kind) must intervene with force. So here one may ask: apart from the Turkish middle class and whatever known fringes may be familiar to the Turkish political scene, who else may have been in that crowd?
And who put them there?
Ah, the gate opens to wild speculations.
To trim that some, I thought we might look together at RT‘s coverage of the story.
“There is now a menace which is called Twitter,” Erdogan said on Sunday, dismissing the protests as organized by extreme elements. “The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.”
Turkish police have taken several dozen lawyers into custody for joining the ongoing protests. The arrests in Istanbul come as police launched a crackdown on protesters in the city’s Taksim Square.
If you were the Russian autocrat, would you not wish to fan the flames beating at the bottom of the Turkish one?
Perhaps “yes”, but I’m not certain I would have to work hard, or even at all, to play up the drama, disrupt Erdogan’s Administration, and, just a jogging bit, shake the NATO tree.
“There are serious clashes in the small streets surrounding the square. They are running after each other tossing stones, bottles and smoke grenades there. It’s a real meat grinder in there,” reports RT’s Ashraf El Sabbagh.
Is the statement embedded in the RT article inflammatory or just plain good dramatic reporting?
My call: the latter.
Autocratic regimes or ones drifting in that direction — I would not write differently about Putin’s — do it to themselves. The more they feel they control in their spheres — and control is what autocrats and “malignant narcissists” are all about, that plus themselves, their image, their glory — and the more they extend that control into the reasonable provinces of constituent life, the more resentment they sow and, over time, the more chaos too when those resentments surface from multiple constituencies, including those with whom they have dealt with a heavy hand.
Tarasov also names the government-led soft Islamization as a possible reason. Some people didn’t like plans to demolish the Ataturk Cultural Center and build a mosque at the site, thus neglecting the heritage and legacy of the first President of Turkey Kemal Ataturk.
Erdogan’s in moral and psychological trouble, and that trouble starts with denial and the convenient pointing of the finger elsewhere, but by the numbers, he’s not in political trouble.
The opposition currently appears too weak to play a significant role. The Republic People’s Party (CHP) of Kilicdaroglu is not expected to total more than 25 percent of the vote; the ultra-nationalist ‘Grey Wolves’ of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) are estimated at around 10 percent while the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party will probably total 6 percent of votes.
While I feel Erodan’s right to suggest protesters meet him at the ballot box, God knows how the autocrat has been working the ropes to rig them. He’s ditched a class of career military men and jailed or harassed publishers and journalists, for a start.
Erdogan’s growing appetite has become truly swinish and planted in him the messianic belief that he was sent directly by the Divine Presence to return Turkey to its days of glory and rebuild the Ottoman Empire. This was viewed by many as the main source of Erdogan’s megalomania that is now absorbing a strong, unexpected blow from the masses in Istanbul’s squares, who call him “tyrant” and “dictator.”
Five days ago from Haberler.com:
Erdogan is no creator, nor a prophet, and has not been in heaven – only in North Africa here on earth. But he should take advantage of the deep faith of many Muslims and turn away from his intransigence against those who disagree with him, against awkward media and against his critics in Turkish society. Gül und Arinc have prepared the way. This is Erdogan’s last chance to break from his harsh policy.
Does he know what he looks like to the free world — the world that hosts the United Nations, the Center for the Protection of Journalists, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and Haaretz?
Soon the square, home to days of protests over what demonstrators call an increasingly authoritarian government, was filed with chaos. Hugely loud bangs echoed through the area — likely the result of stun grenades. Thousands packed back into Taksim Square, surrounding a large bonfire that they were fueling with whatever they could pick ups.
You get the idea: ” . . . vandals and terrorists . . . .” say the dictators, chief themselves among Vandals and terrorists.
(And sorry for putting up the Bobbies as Turkish footage — I need more powerful coffee to catch some who post footage from one context and past over it some immediately relevant headline. That clip is gone, and all else seems to have come from Turkey in the last 24 hours or so).
What they’re ignoring is that this is actually how democracy works. Even in a free society, the state has to have some secrets. The means and methods by which it tracks terrorists should, I’d suggest, be one of them. Should those means and methods be subject to scrutiny? Yes. Should that scrutiny come from our democratically elected representatives? Yes. Should the powers being scrutinised also be the subject of checks and balances from the courts? Yes. In other words, precisely what has been happening with Prism.
Jeffrey Toobin posting on The New Yorker’s web site: “Indeed, Snowden was so irresponsible in what he gave the Guardian and the Postthat even these institutions thought some of it should not be disseminated to the public. The Postdecided to publish only four of the forty-one slides that Snowden provided. Its exercise of judgment suggests the absence of Snowden’s.”
Toobin’s colleague John Cassidy provides counterpoint: “He is a hero. (My colleague Jeffrey Toobin disagrees.) In revealing the colossal scale of the U.S. government’s eavesdropping on Americans and other people around the world, he has performed a great public service that more than outweighs any breach of trust he may have committed.”
In Politico, Tal Kopan has worked up a scathing indictment of Snowden’s character founded on the slant of the details, from Snowden’s dropping out of high school, albeit completing his GED coursework in the community college system, to the stickers on his laptop: “4.His laptop stickers reveal his beliefs. Stickers on Snowden’s laptop express support for Internet freedom, The Guardian said. One reads, “I support Online Rights: Electronic Frontier Foundation,” and another is for the Tor Project, an online anonymity software.”
“The main stipulation for seeking asylum in Iceland would be that the person must be in Iceland to start the process,” said Johannes Tomasson, the chief spokesman for Iceland’s Ministry of Interior in Reykjavik. “That would be the ground rule No. 1.”
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, AOL and Paltalk erected what the New York Timesdescribes as “locked mailboxes” in which to place data on suspicious persons requested by the government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The Times’ description, published Saturday, used unnamed sources.
Basically, it looks like the post-911 Bush Administration launched a broad and comprehensive effort to detect terrorists and their operations (apparently, ignoring plain old gumshoe Russian intelligence sharing prior to the Boston Marathon bombing shouldn’t be mixed in with this NSA story), and, legally, Congress-approved, by law, Obama has sustained the Bush Administration plan.
This is for my paranoids — it’s at least four years old, has been viewed more than 57,000 times, and it will take you where you want to go.
God has not exempted geeks from having their own character and personality issues, so here I may lump Assange, the Wikileaks guy (click for the latest on that), and Snowden together — birds of similar feather, says I, and asylum, indeed, is what they have needed.
Regarding what we think we know and what we know we know: the world has a huge black market going in military arms. You should know the name Viktor Bout and then imagine that personality recapitulated for Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the FARC (Colombia), the Sineola people (Mexico) and so on. The small stuff, like the Kalashnikov the Russians overproduced to keep factory employment high, and the RPGs and other small, transportable arms seem to have zero issues getting to these small conflicts. Even when Al Shabaab were kids running amok in Somalia, they were able to fire an RPG into a living room (they didn’t like the man watching a soccer match on his television). To say the U.S. Government supports Al Qaeda in Syria is an “iffy” supposition.
However, let’s look at the kind of curtain suspended everywhere in Islamic and related tribal states — also in states dealing with other insurrection or organized crime: it’s curtain sewn of privacy in communication. A wink, a nod, a slip of paper, a promise, a signal can do untold damage anywhere in the world at any time predicated on the will of those colluding to do evil.
It is natural for the United States to oppose dictatorship of any kind anywhere in the world, but the realpolitik also involves enormous sums in cash, hard assets (like landing strips and naval ports), and investments, and the states of the Arab Peninsula have made fortunes on energy sales, essentially, and reinvestment: there is no one surprised that they would use that financial power to expand their combined political-spiritual enterprise. Whatever officialdom may say, OBL showed the power of the individual to act in accord with the sword verses and sally forth into the infidel world.
If General Idris could get his grip on the loose collection of rebel forces reporting to him and exercise true western-backed control, the Al Qaeda presence in Syria would be marginalized, but because of religious fealty and motivation, which may be misguided (you heard that from a Jew) but is powerful, that Al Qaeda presence may be holding its own in the Syrian — soon to be Syrian-Lebanon — theater
The story is complicated and more so than Facebook “bilge talk” (or international cocktail-type chatter) allows.
To bring freedom to parties who fear it and constituents whose information environments have been managed specifically to engender the fear and hatred of others on one hand and an immense “civilizational narcissism” (check in with Mobarak Haider’s on that) on the other proves difficult — one may stop to look over the Iraq story on that.
But on June 7 a group of Internet activists hopes to give Iranian voters a taste of what an open election feels like by launching an alternative election featuring 20 candidates. The candidates not only include the officially approved eight, but 12 more, ranging from people who failed the official vetting process to reformist leaders and political prisoners.
Radio Free Europe features other stories on Iran’s upcoming elections, of course, but still it’s good to pass along information that indicates interest in more authentic representative government.
Iran’s official elections take place next Friday (June 14, 2013).
Of course one reason why President Barack Obama and other Western leaders are staying well on the sidelines in this conflict may be precisely due to the intelligence reports warning that Assad is a far harder nut to crack than previously thought.
Syrian Army forces guard a checkpoint in Damascus in May 2013. Better armed, and better logistical support.(Reuters)
That and the fact that the rebels are no closer to forming a winning, united or even trustworthy insurgency
The news breaking for the past several hours is that Syrian troops with a boost from Hezbollah have gained control of al-Qusayr, a border town associated with arms smuggling from Lebanon and prized for the highway connecting Damascus to Homs.
Last month, Real Clear Politics suggested that “Without stronger U.S. measures, the most likely outcome is the fragmentation of Syria into warring fiefdoms, with some turf controlled by Iran and some by al-Qaeda” (“U.S. policy on Syria still lacks coherence,” May 1, 2013). As much may be a nightmare come true.
While General Selim Idriss of the Free Syrian Army may be counted on to represent a moderate proto-democratic force, the crowd beneath the umbrella may be too diverse, negatively so, for moving in that one direction.
“As the militias continue to face overwhelming regime firepower the likelihood of their radicalization may increase. moreover, the indigenous rebels may turn to al-Qaeda for high-end weaponry and spectacular tactics as the regime’s escalation leaves the rebels with no proportionate response, as occurred in iraq in 2005-2006. Developing relations with armed opposition leaders and recognizing specific rebel organizations may help to deter this dangerous trend.”
“Nusra is now two Nusras. One that is pursuing al Qaeda’s agenda of a greater Islamic nation, and another that is Syrian with a national agenda to help us fight Assad,” said a senior rebel commander in Syria who has close ties to the Nusra Front.
“It is disintegrating from within.”
Today, the black flag of Al Qaeda flies over Raqqa, Syria.
“Anyone who might have a complaint against any element of the Islamic state, whether the Emir or an ordinary soldier, can come and submit their complaint in any headquarters building of the Islamic state,” the notice stated. “The complaint should be in writing, provide details and give evidence.”
Al-Qaeda then goes on to promise that those who commit transgressions will face justice.
The weird left, from “globalresearch” to “counterpunch” to “infowars” have been having a field day asserting an Obama+Al-Qaeda connection (as much I deduce from the headers alone: “How Obama and Al-Qaeda Became Syrian Bedfellows”; “Obama to Arm Al-Qaeda Terrorists in Syria”.
You can look those up yourself.
I’m only wondering if I need to buy a new olive drab field jacket, say about two sizes up from whatever was in the closet in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In Syria, perhaps signaled by the state’s turnaround in Qusayr, Putin wins this round because, oh honey oh baby Obama, ain’t no one carrying around even a smidgen of the west in less than half a brain wants to hang around with Al Qaeda and its ilk, and it appears those have gotten their hooks into the community of rebel organizations in Syria, General Idriss’s moderate appeal notwithstanding.
Building on the reputation they have earned in recent months as the rebellion’s most accomplished fighters, Islamist units are seeking to assert their authority over civilian life, imposing Islamic codes and punishments and administering day-to-day matters such as divorce, marriage and vehicle licensing.
Their battlefield supremacy has enabled them to seize the economic as well as the military high-ground.
In Raqqa, they also control flour production, earning money from selling to bakeries, some of which they own as well. “Jabhat now own everything here,” one disillusioned secular activist said.
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