EU old boys play politics with Turkey

By Ben Hall in Paris and Chris Bryant in Berlin
Published: April 8 2009 23:25 | Last updated: April 8 2009 23:25
Centre-right governing parties in France and Germany have leapt on the awkward question of Turkey’s place in Europe for their own political advantage as they gear up for elections.

The row between Turkey and other Nato members over the job of secretary-general and US president Barack Obama’s push at the weekend for Turkish membership of the E U allowed the German Christian Democrats and France’s UMP to underline their opposition to Ankara’s accession.

With European parliamentary elections in June, followed in September by Germany’s general election, it pays to tap into popular suspicion of Turkey’s EU credentials, which is particularly strong among conservative and far-right voters.

Angela Merkel, German chancellor, ignored Turkish resistance to the nomination of Anders Fogh Rasmussen as Nato secretary-general, and gave the Danish prime minister her full backing.

She and Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, both reiterated their opposition to EU membership for the predominantly Muslim country.

They have called instead for a “privileged partnership”.

Mr Sarkozy, the most pro-American French leader in a generation, tartly reminded Mr Obama that it is the EU which decides who can join its club.

Ms Merkel did not challenge the US president, but the CSU, her Bavarian sister-party, which risks falling short of the 5 per cent hurdle required to enter the European parliament, seized the moment.

Bernd Posselt, a CSU member of the European parliament criticised Mr Obama for “meddling in the internal affairs of Europe”, and suggested the US should instead accept Turkey as its 51st state.

Horst Seehofer, CSU leader, said Turkey “as a self-proclaimed representative of the Muslim world, clearly doesn’t fit in”.

Mr Sarkozy’s party has sought to play up the Turkish issue to highlight its unity on the subject in contrast to the left’s alleged divisions.

French advocates of Turkish membership inside the government have helpfully changed their minds.

Bernard Kouchner, the left-leaning foreign minister, renounced on Tuesday his support for Turkish entry, saying he was “very shocked” by Ankara’s behaviour at the Nato summit.

Mr Kouchner said he was also concerned by Turkey’s evolution towards a “strengthened religion, a secularism that is less emphasised”.

Turkey’s Secret Power Brokers

Soner Cagaptay

The Islamists aren't getting rid of Turkey's shady Deep State, but replacing it with one of their own.


Conspiracy theories have been popular in the former Ottoman Empire ever since the 19th century, when Turkey became a pawn in Great Power games. But even by that standard, the current stories swirling around Istanbul and Ankara take the cake. Tales of a sinister "Deep State" (Derin Devlet) have surfaced in a recent court case alleging that underneath Turkey's modern democracy lies a powerful but invisible security and bureaucratic establishment that is plotting to undermine the elected government.

The charges have arisen in a case known as Ergenekon. According to government prosecutors, the Deep State, identified as a group of judges, journalists, union leaders, artists and retired military officers, were plotting a coup against the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). The court papers say these secular nationalists were also, implausibly, planning Islamist, Marxist and pro-Kurdish terror attacks—all at the same time. In any other Western society, such incoherent accusations would be dismissed as fantasy. In Turkey, they've gained traction, for the simple reason that the country has long had a dominant security clique. Yet what the current rumors miss is that that power base has been broken up in recent years. Today it's the Islamists who are pulling the strings.

The old Deep State surfaced at various times in Turkey's history, stepping in to remove elected governments that strayed too far from the secular legacy of Kemal Atatürk, modern Turkey's founder. The sometimes corrupt and cozy links built by this establishment came to light most spectacularly in 1996, when an unlikely foursome—a politician, a police chief, a beauty queen and a drug lord—got into a car accident. Only the politician survived, and the ensuing embarrassing press coverage allowed Turkey's increasingly robust middle class to push back against this corrupt elite that had long limited their freedoms.

The Deep State was further weakened by the European Union accession process, which began soon after. In 1999, the EU decided to consider Turkey's candidacy—but only if Ankara improved civil liberties, weakened the military's role in politics and consolidated the country's democracy. Then, in 2002, the AKP came to power. At first it seemed to abandon its Islamist roots and embrace EU accession in order to win liberal support. Many Turkish democrats hoped the AKP would eliminate the Deep State once and for all and threw their support behind the party.

Yet in the seven years since, rather than get rid of the shadowy power brokers, the AKP has used cases like Ergenekon—which seems to have involved a genuine plot to overthrow the government—to attack Turkey's secular judges, media, its military and practically any political opponents. The police have taken more than 100 supposed plotters into custody, including not just underworld figures, but also journalists, military officers, businesspeople, judges and academics. Political opponents of the AKP have been pulled out of bed in the early morning hours, only to be released after three days of harsh police questioning. Unsurprisingly, many of these "suspects" have subsequently become much more docile.

Lest there be any doubt about the absurdity of some of the government's claims, consider: the Ergenekon case is based in part on the testimony of one Tuncay Guney, who claims to be a former Turkish intelligence officer now living in exile in Canada—where he says he's become a Hasidic rabbi. Never mind the fact that the Toronto Jewish community says Guney is neither a rabbi nor even Jewish; his assumed identity fits neatly into the anti-Semitism of Turkey's Islamists, who like to portray Jews as a nefarious influence in their country. Some of the allegations are also wildly contradictory. For example, prosecutors claim that Ergenekon plotters were backed by Washington. Yet they also say they planned to attack NATO installations in Turkey.

The tragedy here is that the AKP is not just using Ergenekon to rid Turkey of the old Deep State, but to intimidate its legitimate opposition ahead of nationwide local elections on March 29. As the last elections suggested, more than half the population still opposes the AKP, but many are now afraid to speak out due to signs that the government is monitoring its enemies. Journalists critical of the government have had embarrassing personal conversations leaked to pro-AKP media, and the police have recorded more than 1.5 million phone calls and e-mails in the Ergenekon case alone.

Such signs suggest that the AKP has replaced the old Deep State with a new one of its own. While still using the ghost of the previous establishment to conduct a witch hunt, now the Islamists are pulling the levers of power. The Deep State may have once functioned to intimidate communists and Islamists, but today it is used against secular, liberal and nationalist Turks in order to crush dissent. Turkey's progressives must be heartbroken. They hoped that political modernization and the AKP would finally rid their state of conspiracy theories and shadowy powers behind the throne. But such a change would have required a liberal party at the country's helm.

Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of "Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is a Turk?"

Turkish children drawn into Armenia row

Serdar Kaya is 43 and has never been to court before; now he's suing the Turkish ministry of education.

The father of an 11-year old girl, Mr Kaya is angry that she was forced to watch what he calls a "very bloody propaganda film" at school.

Sari Gelin, or "Blonde Bride", was commissioned by the Turkish General Staff and distributed in recent months by the education ministry.

It is an attempt to counter what Turkey calls "baseless" claims that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against the Armenians in 1915.

The DVD was sent to all elementary schools with a note instructing teachers to show it to pupils and report back.

At the school of Mr Kaya's daughter, children as young as six had to watch.

"This film is not fit for adults, let alone children," he says.

"They're promoting discrimination, branding certain people as 'others' and teaching children to do the same. My daughter will not be part of this enmity."

Mr Kaya has applied to the courts to sue Education Minister Huseyin Celik, arguing the film incites ethnic hatred against Armenians.

There are around 50,000 Turkish-Armenians left in Turkey, mostly in Istanbul.

In a statement last month, the ministry said it had stopped distributing the film and claimed it was never intended for children.

But teachers are still receiving official reminders to screen it.

'Very dangerous'

Sari Gelin presents the Turkish state's case that the Armenians betrayed the benevolent Ottoman Empire during World War I, siding with invading foreign forces and massacring thousands of Turks.

The film says the Armenians were "relocated" as a result of their actions.

There is no mention of the hundreds of thousands who perished or were killed on the long march through the desert.

Instead, elderly men relate how Armenians cooked Turkish babies alive and used civilians as firewood.

"The word Armenian is used very many times and always negatively," says Ayse Gul Altinay, a board member of the Hrant Dink Foundation.

She has good reason for concern.

Two years ago, Hrant Dink - a prominent Turkish-Armenian writer - was shot and killed by a teenager, who saw him as an enemy of the state.

So, the foundation created in his memory has also applied to the courts to get Sari Gelin withdrawn from schools.

"Showing young people a film with graphic scenes of violence, that repeats over and again that the Armenians stabbed the Turks in the back, and killed innocent women and babies and civilians is very dangerous," Ms Altinay says.

"We worry it will create more hatred."

Clear message

Outside the school attended by Mr Kaya's daughter, parents' opinions were divided.

"I don't think it's right to show children such a film, not at their age," another father said.

"But in Turkey, when there's an order from above, the officials have to comply."

However, one of the teachers disagreed: "We teach children who our enemies are and which countries tried to divide up our territory, but we don't teach them about the Armenians.

"So I thought this film was good, and objective."

Turkey is coming under increasing international pressure to acknowledge the 1915 deportation and mass killing of Ottoman Armenians as genocide.

The US House of Representatives has just introduced a resolution on the issue and when Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency, he pledged to recognise the Armenian genocide as a "widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence".

Ankara is lobbying hard against such a move, arguing it would jeopardise its recent efforts at reconciliation with Armenia.

Official ties with Yerevan were cut in the 1990s, and the countries' common border was closed.

But while Turkey is open to renewing trade and diplomatic ties with its neighbour, the distribution of this film suggests it is more closed than ever to any discussion of its history.

The education ministry's statement calls Sari Gelin a balanced, historical account, but the clear message it gives Turkish school-children is that Armenians are traitors and their enemies.

‘Gata-kulli’ veya ‘Feto-kulli’

Nuray Mert

Fethullah Gülen, Türkçe Olimpiyatları vesilesiyle, ABD’ye gidip, kendisiyle görüşen birtakım gazetecilerle sohbet etmiş, Mahmut Övür, izlenimlerini yazmış, bu izlenimlerden bazı
çarpıcı bölümler başlık oldu, tartışma yarattı.
Çarpıcı ifadelerden biri ‘Gata-kulli’ idi. Şaka mı yapmış, bu lafı ilk kim etmiş tartışıladursun, kesin olan bir şey var. Ergenekon davasının tartışması çerçevesinde, bazıları Türkiye’de bir büyük ‘Gata-kulli’ olduğunu düşünüyor, bunu teşhir etmek gerektiği üzerine yoğunlaşmış vaziyette. Buna karşın, diğer bazıları da, her işte bir ‘Feto-kulli’ olduğunu
düşünüyor, açıkça veya dolaylı olarak bunu söylüyor.
Türkiye’de siyaset üzerinde öteden beri, bir ‘Gata-kulli’ olduğunu biliyor, yani askerlerin -sivil siyasete müdahalesi, bu müdahalenin derecesini, mahiyetini tartışıyoruz. Tartışıyoruz ama, ‘Asker’ veya ‘Ordu’ dediğimiz kurum, diğer kısıtlar bir yana, kapalı bir kutu, sonuna kadar gidemiyoruz. Buna karşın, Fetullah Gülen vakası da, az kapalı bir kutu değil. O nedenle, işin içine Fethullah Hoca konusu girdiği anda, mesele sivil siyasetin askeri müdahale meselesini sorgulaması olmaktan çıkıyor. İnsan, ‘bu kapalı kutuların birbirleri ile meseleleri nedir?’ sorusunun cevabını kolaylıkla veremiyor.
Fethullah Gülen çevresi (hadi ‘cemaat’ değil ‘çevre’ diyelim), ısrarla tüm soruları es geçiyor, alabildiğine kibar bir dille, soruları anlamazlıktan geliyor. ‘Hocamız, kendi halinde bir din adamıdır, etliye sütlüye karışmaz, niye parmağınızı sarıyorsunuz’dan başka dişe değer, ikna edici söz yok! Tamam bu ülkede din, dindar deyince işin içinde mutlaka bir ‘çapanoğlu’ arayan çok. Ama bu böyle diye, bu bahaneye sığınıp, faaliyeti, etkisi Türkiye’yi aşmış, her yerde karşınıza çıkan bir büyük organizasyon, çevre konusunda sorulan her şeyi, ‘yok öyle şeyler, yok böyle şeyler’ diye geçiştirmek hiç de ikna edici değil.
Ben defalarca yazdım, Fethullah Gülen çevresi tarafından dünyanın dört yanına yayılmış ‘Türk kolejleri’ hikâyesi nedir? ‘Türkçeyi yayıyoruz, fena mı yapıyoruz?’ cevap değil. Hadi kalkıp herhangi biri Türkçeyi, Türk kültürünü yaymak için bu ülkelerden birine gitsin bakalım, değil, okul, kurs açabiliyor mu? Dünya bir gül bahçesi mi de, aklına eden hayırsever, Türk kültürüsever, istediği yerde faaliyet gösteriyor? Hem bakın yanı başımızda
kültür bağlarımız onca güçlü, üstelik Türkçe’nin çok yaygın olduğu İran, bu işler için biçilmiş kaftan, neden orada böylesi bir ‘Türk koleji’ yok? Ne tesadüf ki, ABD’nin kapsama alanı dışında kalan yerlerde bu kültür-hayır işleri tutunamıyor.
Hiçbir şey ima etmeye çalışmıyorum, açıkça söylüyorum. Bu kimsenin ABD’nin dış politika ‘alet’i olması olmayabilir, ama aradaki sıkı bağ çok aşikâr. Dahası bu bağ yeni değil, işin başında, Sovyetler’in dağılış sürecinde, mesela ABD’nin Orta Asya Türki Cumhuriyetlerine nüfuz grişiminde, ona eşlik etmek Türkiye’de devlet politikasıydı. O zaman, Fethullah Gülen çevresinin ‘devlet’le ilişkisi son derece iyiydi. İslamcı Refah Partisi’ne mesafe konuluyordu, dahası Fethullah Hoca 1989’da, İzmir’de yaptığı bir konuşmada, üniversiyete girmek için eylem yapan başörtülü kızlara ‘anarşist’ diyordu.
Bu uzun bir hikâyedir, bu işlere yeni başlayıp kalem oynatanlara mevzunun sıradan ‘din alerjisi’, ‘ulusalcı refleks’ konusu olmadığını düşünmelerini tavsiye ederim. Diğerlerine ise kısaca, ‘Siz de biliyorsunuz, Türkiye’de yaşananlar, Ergeneokon da dahil olmak üzere, bir noktadan sonra, demokrasi mücadelesi olmaktan çok, devletin derinliklerinde yaşanan süreçler ve kavgalar, açıkça konuşacaksak, Gata kulli veya Feto kulli, tümünü açıkça konuşalım’ demek isterim.

A devastating document is met with silence in Turkey

ISTANBUL: For Turkey, the number should have been a bombshell.

According to a long-hidden document that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916.

In Turkey, any discussion of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians can bring a storm of public outrage. But since its publication in a book in January, the number - and its Ottoman source - has gone virtually unmentioned. Newspapers hardly wrote about it. Television shows have not discussed it.

"Nothing," said Murat Bardakci, the Turkish author and columnist who compiled the book.

The silence can mean only one thing, he said: "My numbers are too high for ordinary people. Maybe people aren't ready to talk about it yet."

For generations, most Turks knew nothing of the details of the Armenian genocide from 1915 to 1918, when more than a million Armenians were killed as the Ottoman Turk government purged the population.

Turkey locked the ugliest parts of its past out of sight, Soviet-style, keeping any mention of the events out of schoolbooks and official narratives in an aggressive campaign of forgetting.

But in the past 10 years, as civil society has flourished here, some parts of Turkish society are now openly questioning the state's version of events. In December, a group of intellectuals circulated a petition that apologized for the denial of the massacres. Some 29,000 people have signed it.

With his book, "The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha," Bardakci (pronounced bard-AK-chuh) has become, rather unwillingly, part of this ferment. The book is a collection of documents and records that once belonged to Mehmed Talat, known as Talat Pasha, the primary architect of the Armenian deportations.

The documents, given to Bardakci by Talat's widow, Hayriye, before she died in 1983, include lists of population figures. Before 1915, 1,256,000 Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, according to the documents. The number plunged to 284,157 two years later, Bardakci said.

To the untrained ear, it is simply a sad statistic. But anyone familiar with the issue knows the numbers are in fierce dispute.

Turkey has never acknowledged a specific number of deportees or deaths. On Sunday, the Turkish foreign minister, Ali Babacan, warned that President Barack Obama might set back relations if he recognized the massacre of Armenians as genocide ahead of his visit to Turkey next month.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was bloody, the Turkish argument goes, and those who died were victims of that chaos.

Bardakci subscribes to that view. The figures, he said, do not indicate the number of dead, only the result of the decline in the Armenian population after deportation. He strongly disagrees that the massacres amounted to a genocide, and says that Turkey was obliged to take action against Armenians because they were openly supporting Russia in its war against the Ottoman Empire.

"It was not a Nazi policy or a Holocaust," he said. "These were very dark times. It was a very difficult decision. But deportation was the outcome of some very bloody events. It was necessary for the government to deport the Armenian population."

This argument is rejected by most scholars, who believe that the small number of Armenian rebels were not a serious threat to the Ottoman Empire, and that the policy was more the product of the perception that the Armenians, non-Muslims and therefore considered untrustworthy, were a problem population.

Hilmar Kaiser, a historian and expert on the Armenian genocide, said the records published in the book were conclusive proof from the Ottoman authority itself that it had pursued a calculated policy to eliminate the Armenians. "You have suddenly on one page confirmation of the numbers," he said. "It was like someone hit you over the head with a club."

Kaiser said the before-and-after figures amounted to "a death record."

"There is no other way of viewing this document," he said. "You can't just hide a million people."

Other scholars said that the number is a useful addition to the historical record but that it does not introduce a new version of events.

"This corroborates what we already knew," said Donald Bloxham, the author of "The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians."

Bardakci is a history buff who learned to read and write Ottoman script from his grandmother, allowing him to navigate Turkey's written past, something that most Turks are unable to do. He plays the tanbur, a traditional string instrument. His grandfather was a member of the same political party as Talat, and his family knew many of the important political figures in Turkey's founding.

"We had a huge library at home," he said. "They were always talking about history and the past." Though Bardacki clearly wanted the numbers to be known, he stubbornly refuses to interpret them. He offers no analysis in the book, and aside from an interview with Talat's widow, there is virtually no text beside the original documents.

"I didn't want to interpret," he said. "I want the reader to decide."

The best way to do that, he argues, is by using cold, hard facts, which can cut through the layers of emotional rhetoric that have clouded the issue for years.

"I believe we need documents in Turkey," he said. "This is the most important."

But some of the keenest observers of Turkish society said the silence was a sign of just how taboo the topic still is. "The importance of the book is obvious from the fact that no paper except Milliyet has written a single line about it," wrote Murat Belge, a Turkish academic, in a January column in the liberal daily newspaper Taraf.

Still, it is a measure of Turkey's democratic maturity that the book was published here at all. Bardakci said he had held the documents for so long - 27 years - because he was waiting for Turkey to reach the point when their publication would not cause a frenzy.

Even now, the state feels the need to defend itself. Last summer, a propaganda film about the Armenians made by the Turkish military was distributed to primary schools. After a public outcry, it was stopped.

"I could never have published this book 10 years ago," Bardakci said. "I would have been called a traitor."

He added, "The mentality has changed."

Growing Turkish ire due to job and wage cuts

A man held a gun to his head and another to his chest outside the Turkish prime minister’s office on Monday in a dramatic protest over economic hardship.

It is not the first time Turks hit by economic crisis have turned to melodramatic means to bring their financial troubles to the government’s attention. But with violent protests breaking out in other recession-hit countries, Monday’s incident is a worrying sign for prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as he tries to convince voters that Turkey can escape the worst effects of the global downturn.

So far, although trade unions have organised rallies to demonstrate against policies, the economic crisis has not sparked protests in Turkey on the scale of those seen in Greece, Russia or even the UK.

But tales of personal distress in Turkey – the gunman was a retired policeman protesting at his inability to pay off debts – are multiplying as the worldwide manufacturing slump forces Turkish companies to lay off workers or cut wages during halts in production.

The latest data showed unemployment above 12 per cent at the end of 2008, the highest in five years, and economists say these figures may understate the reality due to the scale of the unregistered economy. Banks are reporting rising numbers of small businesses and credit card borrowers unable to pay debts.

Economists worry the prime minister’s drive to win votes in next month’s local elections is undermining fiscal policy, noting that January’s cash budget deficit was almost six times bigger than a year earlier.

The government has announced a limited stimulus package that gives employers bigger subsidies to keep workers they would otherwise lay off, and includes tax breaks aimed at boosting car sales and encouraging investment in the poorer south-east. Further measures under consideration are rumoured to include direct payments to people on low incomes.

“We think the pace of easing in both monetary and fiscal policies is too rapid, and ignores a host of ... weaknesses that set Turkey apart from advanced economies,” said analysts at the consultancy Istanbul Analytics.

Mr Erdogan insists Turkey is a “safe haven” in comparison with some neighbours in eastern Europe and can afford to hold out in negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for a deal that does not impose unpopular conditions.

Crashed Turkish airline was on autopilot

The Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 that crashed at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport last week, killing nine, was running on autopilot and stalled because a faulty altimeter prompted the plane to cut power to its engines, Dutch safety officials said on Wednesday.

The initial findings have prompted the Dutch Safety Board to issue a warning to Boeing to prevent faulty radio altimeters influencing the autopilot. But they also raised questions about the role of the pilots, who were among those killed.

Pieter van Vollenhoven, chairman of the safety board, said the use of autopilot when descending to land was common practice at Turkish Airlines although policies varied between carriers.

Data from the black box flight recorder showed that the left-hand of two radio altimeters that are used for precise altitude measurements when landing gave an erroneous reading of the plane’s height, telling the autopilot the plane was 8ft below sea level rather than 1,950ft above.

“This sudden change in altitude had a direct effect on the automatic throttle which controls engine power during the descent,” Mr van Vollenhoven told a news conference. “The aircraft reacted as if it was at a height of just a few metres above the runway by fully cutting engine power.”

The erroneous altitude reading triggered an automatic warning telling the pilots to deploy the plane’s undercarriage. The plane also lost speed. But the crew ignored both the warning and the loss of airspeed, Mr van Vollenhoven said.

Only when the control stick started to vibrate to signal that the plane had slowed to stalling speed did the pilots react by applying full power, by which time the plane was at 450ft.

“However this was too late for the plane to regain flight,” Mr van Vollenhoven said.

The black box, which had data from eight previous flights recorded on it, showed that the same error with the altimeter had occurred at least twice already.

Boeing has been asked to change the manual for Boeing 737s to forbid the use of autopilot and the automatic throttle during descent and landing if there is an error in the radio altimeters, Mr van Vollenhoven said. Boeing was also urged to investigate whether the same should apply during normal flight.

The safety board had found no other evidence of problems with the aircraft or irregularities during the flight, he said.

As well as the three pilots in the cockpit, one other crew member and five passengers were killed when the plane crashed one kilometre from the runway.

Turkish Airlines’ last fatal crash was in January 2003, when a domestic flight came down in fog when attempting to land at Diyarbakir, a city in the south-east of Turkey. It was the first fatal air accident at Schiphol since 1994.

Turkey sees silver lining in strong euro

By Delphine Strauss in Istanbul

Published: February 24 2009 22:41 | Last updated: February 24 2009 22:41

Turkish businesses are used to lamenting their country’s volatile currency and snail’s pace progress towards European Union membership. This year there may be one advantage from these realities – at least for the tens of thousands who rely on tourism.

Over the last year the lira has fallen by about a third against the dollar and nearly a fifth against the euro. Tourism officials hope that, even in a year of recession, the currency advantage will tempt holidaymakers to Turkey.

“To be out of the eurozone is an advantage for us,” said Ahmet Barut, chairman of the Turkish Hotels Federation, which represents about 2,000 members.

No one expects a repeat of last year’s growth, when tourism revenues leapt 18.5 per cent to nearly $22bn. The number of foreign visitors in fact fell 4 per cent in January, the first decline in more than two years.

But despite a slow start to bookings for summer, ministers and analysts still forecast visitor numbers will grow this year.

Turkey is set to receive a stream of British tourists, spurning eurozone beach resorts where their spending power in sterling is severely reduced. British-based tour operators TUI Travel and Thomas Cook both report strong growth in Turkish bookings.

UK bookings for Turkey this summer had jumped 25 per cent year on year, compared with a drop of 10 per cent for the business as a whole, according to Ian Derbyshire, chief executive of Thomas Cook independent travel.

He said Turkey was now benefiting from a strategy of using its lower land and labour prices to develop big four- and five-star hotels offering all-inclusive holidays.

But for many small businesses, the big question will be whether visitors are willing to leave their hotels and spend extra cash.

In Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, shopkeepers adept at quoting prices in several currencies watch the lira’s fluctuations constantly. For those who rely on sales to tourists, its latest slide could be a lifeline.

“It’s helpful for us. We can sell at much more normal prices,” said Ozgur Bilgili, offering tea in his family’s leather shop. Pulling a jacket from the rack to demonstrate, he said, “This would have cost $300 in the bad days. Now I can ask $250.”

“I’m not very worried, but I’m a little bit nervous,” said Sefer Savran, manager of an adventure activity company in the Mediterranean resort of Kas, who thought European tourists would come for shorter breaks not too far from home.

He had already offered travel agents a 15-20 per cent discount on his usual euro prices, but said agents did not yet know whether they would need to offer it.

Anatolian Balloons, which runs flights over the twisted rock formations of Cappadocia, is not cutting prices – it has just bought 17 hot air balloons, and paid in foreign exchange for the imported gas and equipment.

Numbers taking the €150 flight were lower than normal this winter, but the company said bookings for summer from tour companies were already promising.

But the currency advantage over eurozone resorts will go only part of the way to soothing the nerves of Turkey’s restaurateurs and hotel owners.

They worry that Israeli tourists, who numbered some 500,000 last year, will stay away after Ankara’s criticism of the Gaza offensive. And Russia, the biggest source of visitors after Germany, has its own troubles.

One shopkeeper summed up the feeling in the Grand Bazaar.

“The currency is good but there is no money. We’re all very worried.”

Turkish airliner crashes at Amsterdam airport, 9 dead

By Harro ten Wolde

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Turkish Airlines passenger plane with 135 people aboard crashed in light fog while trying to land at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport on Wednesday, killing nine, a local official said.

Haarlemmermeer acting Mayor Michel Bezuijen said 50 people were injured, 25 severely, when flight 1951 crashed at 10:31 local time (4:31 a.m. EST) short of a runway at Schiphol, Europe's fifth-largest by passenger volume.

The cause of the crash was still not clear, Bezuijen told reporters.

Dutch television showed what appeared to be covered bodies on the ground near the crashed single-aisle Boeing 737 jetliner.

The crumpled plane lay in three parts, with the tail section of the fuselage broken off, and a wide crack in the fuselage just behind the cockpit. The airliner had not caught fire.

"We are in the middle of a field now, approximately 5-6 km from the airport," Survivor Mustafa Bahcecioglu told Turkish broadcaster Channel 24.

"The majority of the passengers are injured but there are people who are not injured. Around 30 ambulances have come," he said.

Airport officials said the crashed aircraft was a Boeing 737-800, flight TK 1951 from Istanbul.

The plane, on a flight from Istanbul, broke up when it hit the ground north of a runway at Schiphol, which is 20 km (12 miles) southwest of Amsterdam's center.

At Schiphol airport, 10 flights were delayed and 10 were canceled, but otherwise operations were as usual.

Survivor Huseyin Sumer told CNN Turk by telephone: "The plane split into three parts. We are calling people to say the situation is not very serious but there might be casualties on the front side of the plane."

The crash appeared to be the worst since an El Al cargo plane crashed into high-rise apartment blocks in a southeastern suburb of Amsterdam in October 1992, killing 43 people, 39 of them on the ground.

The 1992 cargo plane was a Boeing 747. It plowed into the buildings, setting them on fire, shortly after takeoff after two engines had broken off.

(Writing by Reed Stevenson; Additional reporting by Niclas Mika, Gilbert Kreijger, Catherine Hornby in Amsterdam, Philip Blenkinsop, Paul de Bendern in Istanbul and Ibon Villelabeitia in Ankara; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Turks reveal xenophobic, conservative attitudes in poll

Robert Tait

Turks are xenophobic, socially conservative people who rarely read books, relegate women to second-class status and harbour ambivalent views about democracy, contentious new research has revealed.

The unflattering picture has emerged from a survey by one of Turkey's most respected polling organisations, Konda, which interviewed 6,482 people.

Some 73% opposed allowing foreigners to own Turkish land or property, while nine out of 10 said they had never taken a holiday abroad. Just under 70% said they never read books, and 72% said they never or rarely bought new hi-tech products as soon they appeared on the market. Many also expressed fears that Turkey's neighbours planned to carve up the country.

Nearly 70% said wives needed their husband's permission to work while 57% believed that a female should never leave home wearing a sleeveless top. More than half - 53% - favoured allowing women judges, prosecutors, teachers and other public servants to wear the Islamic headscarf on duty, something Turkey's secular constitution forbids.

While 88% agreed that Turkey should be governed by democracy "under each and every condition", this was undermined by the significant proportion - 48% - who said the military should intervene "when necessary". The powerful armed forces have toppled four elected governments in coups in the past 50 years.

The survey, entitled Who Are We?, was conducted on behalf of Hurriyet, one of Turkey's biggest selling newspapers, renowned for its secularist outlook.

Tarhan Erdem, senior analyst with Konda, said the research was aimed at understanding ongoing social transformation and seeing whether Turkey was the country many of its people thought they knew. The high support for military intervention showed Turks had reservations about democracy, he said, while attitudes towards women exposed a lack of gender equality. "The data shows that women aren't free in their private lives," Erdem said.

Ahmet Insel, a columnist with Radikal newspaper, said opposition to foreign travel and property ownership stemmed from a preoccupation with the 1919-1923 war of independence that established modern Turkey.

"We think the war of independence is still under way, so it's no surprise we are xenophobic. We're still fighting foreigners," he said.

Turkish media group given $408m tax fine

By Delphine Strauss in Ankara

Published: February 18 2009 23:45 | Last updated: February 18 2009 23:45

Turkey’s biggest media group has once again fallen foul of the authorities, incurring a TL693m ($408m) tax fine at a time when its advertising revenues are set to weaken and its parent company wants to use its cash to expand in other sectors.

Dogan Yayin, which owns TV channels and some of Turkey’s top-selling daily newspapers, on Wednesday disclosed the fine, which is bigger than its current market capitalisation. The group, which plans to appeal, said it had also been ordered to pay back taxes of TL132.9m.

Shares fell 17.7 per cent on Istanbul’s stock exchange on Wednesday, while shares in its parent, Dogan Holding, fell 14.1 per cent.

The penalty is the latest in a string of regulatory decisions against the media and energy conglomerate, controlled by billionaire Aydin Dogan.

Its subsidiary Petrol Ofisi, a fuel distributor in which Austria’s OMV has a 34 per cent stake, faced a tax fine last year but made a deal to pay a reduced amount.

Investors worry that the group could be suffering from a public row between Mr Dogan and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, who last autumn called on his supporters to boycott Dogan publications due to coverage of a corruption scandal.

“This is normal for us. I’m not surprised,” said Dr Ragip Nebil Ilseven, chief executive of Dogan Holding. But Salih Yendi, chief of the tax authority, told Bloomberg neither the fine nor the timing of the announcement was political.

The latest fine relates to profits Dogan Yayin made when it sold its 25 per cent stake in Dogan TV to the German publisher Axel Springer in late 2006 – a partnership it extended recently, with Axel Springer gaining a board seat and a stake in Dogan Yayin.

If the fine were enforced in full, Dogan Holding – which has net cash of about $1.1bn – may have to step in to help its more indebted subsidiary.

Sinan Goksen, analyst at Expres Invest, said that could hinder the group in other projects, including its plan to bid in a 50-50 joint venture with Italy’s Lottomatica in the privatisation of Turkey’s national lottery.

Toygun Onaran, analyst at KBC Financial Products, said that even if the fine were not exacted in full, “this is making the situation unclear, and in this unclear situation nobody wants that risk”.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009