Sundays in Turkey are a day off for rest and recuperation before resuming the daily grind on Monday morning in the fight to earn a living. These days, throngs of Turks, mostly young ones, are engaged in another type of daily struggle: the fight for their lost freedom. The foregoing is representative of much of the analyses in Western dailies on the current situation in Turkey. President Abdullah Gül has described them as biased and inaccurate. Not surprisingly, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's reaction was more vehement. He denounced them as racist, hate mongering and part of a conspiracy against his country. This week's Economist, in particular, appears to have raised his heckles. The periodical was harshly critical of the authoritarian tendencies of the Turkish leader. “Turkey will not put up with a middle class democrat behaving like an Ottoman sultan,” it wrote. And to drive home the point, it featured a picture with Erdogan's face Photoshopped onto an oil painting of an Ottoman sultan, carrying a gas mask in one hand and a string of prayer beads in the other. The British press, in general, appears to be carrying out an ancient feud against the Turkish prime minister. In 2010, some quarters of it openly urged the Turkish people not to vote for the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP) in the parliamentary elections that were held that year and, instead, to back the opposition Republican People's Party. The British press has seized upon the Turkish government's crackdowns against the demonstrators in Taksim and other public squares to unleash harsher salvos of criticism against Erdogan, and the rest of the European press is following suit. As though to thumb their noses at those critics who “exercise double standards” and “serve spurious agendas”, JDP leaders notched up their invective against the “occupiers” of Gezi Park in Taksim Square, whom they described as a “minority” of “anarchists” and “rabble”. The mayor of Istanbul, Hüseyin Avni Mutlu, for his part, declared that he would not allow anti-government “riffraff” to gather in that central square in downtown Istanbul. Not that this deterred thousands of angry protesters from continuing their rallies in the square and sustaining a steady stream of chants against Erdogan, in spite of the water canons and clouds of teargas. Meanwhile, officials had no problem with authorising a mass rally in the district of Zeytinburnu in support of the JDP leader. Now, this type of demonstration — the kind that shows unity behind the country's wise leadership, as opposed to the kind taking place in Taksim — was the type of demonstration that helped restore security and stability to the country, after which everyone can go back to exercising their democratic rights, said Mutlu in what was clearly not an exercise of double standards. The government's inflexible and heavy-handed response against the protesters has not only invited a hail of media censure in all European tongues, Western officials have also been critical, if in more diplomatic language. Angela Merkel, for example, urged Ankara not to restrict the rights to assembly and protest. Moreover, the EU Parliament, in which the heir to the Ottoman Empire has long been seeking a seat, issued a resolution condemning police brutality in Turkey and calling upon Ankara to investigate incidents of the use of excessive force against peaceful demonstrators. Officials in Ankara did not like this one bit. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu denounced the European attitude toward Turkey as “unacceptable”. As for Erdogan, who had set accession into the EU among his government's priorities, said that he did not recognise decisions made by the European Parliament. In a speech in Istanbul a week ago, the truculent prime minister also vented his anger against Stefan Füle, the “one responsible for the expansion of the union”, as he railed, again, against European double standards. “Where were you during the riots in Athens and Madrid and the violent protests that coincided with the G8 summit in Belfast?” he said. True, Erdogan may have some justification in denouncing Western double standards. But in this case, he appears to be missing an important point. With numerous journalists behind bars and large segments of the press cowed into self-censorship, Turkey is one of the most repressive countries of press freedoms and the rights of journalists. This is one of the sources of the anger that has fuelled the demonstrations in Turkey, whereas the same cannot be said of the countries Erdogan mentioned. It is also precisely what enabled Füle to state, in another twist of the knife, that there is no place in Europe for those who repress demonstrators and their rights to assembly, strike and protest. In railing against the “two-faced” media, Erdogan curiously overlooked expressions of praise in that very media that lauded the bold and courageous steps he had taken to drive the military back into its barracks and out of politics. He also appears to have forgotten that the EU, in the days when it was still the Common Market, had issued some of the harshest condemnations to come out of any national or international body against the military coups of 1971 and 1980, and that he had the full support of the major newspapers in Paris, London and other European capitals in his battles against the army chiefs-of-staff, the republican public prosecutor and the courts during his campaign to secure civilian rule. One wonders, does he remember the scathing satire in the Western press — which he criticises for its double standards today — of Turkish democracy at the time when Merve Kavakçi of the Fazilet Party was refused entry into parliament because she wore a veil, in spite of the wins of her party in the early elections that were held in 1999? Apparently not. Indeed, he appears bent on confirming many of his critics who fear a JDP design to de-secularise Turkey and who lampoon Erdogan and his fellow Islamists as saying, “We welcome your praise and support, but we reject your criticism, even when you're right.” In all events, Turkish-European relations are rather shaky at the moment. Moreover, they are likely to grow more strained, especially in light of indications coming out of Brussels that the EU may review the question of negotiations over Turkey's accession. The resumption of negotiations, which had been suspended for years but is now being considered again, is highly likely to depend on how the current situation in Turkey unfolds against the backdrop of a ruling party that appears unyielding in the face of a large tide of public opinion pressing for personal and civil freedoms. What is curious about the Turkish crisis is that the powers-that-be in Ankara appear not to have grasped some of the lessons of the Arab Spring. True, there are considerable differences between Turkey and the countries of the Arab Spring. However, some of the attitudes of leaders there are remarkably reminiscent of the attitudes of former Arab leaders, not least in their dismissal of the protesters as a handful of lowlifes, commies or proxies for foreign powers. Surely they should take pause to consider that they may be very out of touch with a much larger segment of public opinion than they imagine. If they do not, they may risk producing a 21st century version of the “Sick Man of Europe”.
