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From tensions rising between North Korea and the U.S., to historic power shifts in Turkey, this is the Week in Pictures.

Fears of an all-out war between North Korea and the U.S. increased this week, as Washington responded to Pyongyang's sabre-rattling with some of its own.After Vice President Mike Pence visited the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas on April 17, he headed to Japan to reassure the nationand offer some strong words for the isolated regime.

"The era of strategic patience is over and while all options are on the table, President (Donald) Trump is determined to work closely with Japan, with South Korea, with all our allies in the region and with China to achieve a peaceable resolution and the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula," Pence said in Tokyo before lunch with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

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Pence's comments came after a warning by a senior North Korean official that his government plans weekly tests and an "all-out war" if the U.S. takes any action against it, and hasno intention of going slow on its missile program.

The White House also issued some strong words inTurkey this week;Trump called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to congratuate himfollowing hisslim victory in a referendum that grants him sweeping powers in the biggest overhaul of modern Turkish politics.The vote will replace Turkey's parliamentary system with an all-powerful presidency and abolish the office of prime minister, a move Erdogan said was necessary to secure the nation against terror and outside influence from Europe and the West. Opponents and international monitors have questioned the legitimacy of the vote and some have said the vote was marred by irregularities, but Trump's call sends a message the White House is behind the results.

Erdogan said on Thursday he would meet Trump in Washington on May 16, in their first meeting since Trump took office in January. Ties between the United States and Turkey have deteriorated sharply since a failed military coup in July and disagreements over U.S. support for a Kurdish militia group fighting the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) in Syria. Turkey sees the group as an extension of the outlawed PKK, which has waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy in southeastern Turkey.

Ankara is also pressing for the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric living in the United States who is accused by Erdogan of engineering the failed coup.

At theweek's conclusion, news broke of an attack in Paris with the ISIStaking credit for themurder of one police officerin a shooting incident on April 20.Masked police immediately took to the streets, blocking access to the Champs-Elysees through the night.The attack comes days before presidential elections. President Francois Hollande said he was convinced the "cowardly killing,"in which the assailant was himself shot dead by police, was an act of terrorism.

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North Korea Tensions, Erdogan's Win in Turkey: The Week in ... - Newsweek

Just after 10 a.m. on the morning of Turkeys constitutional referendum, Suat Oztekin arrived with three colleagues to monitor the vote in a remote Kurdish village.

He left, he says, after being refused entry by the village headman, threatened at gunpoint with arrest and punched in the face by a soldier.

Oztekins account, disputed by a group of locals, may come as little surprise to opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his effort to change Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential republic, with few checks or balances on his power. Yet it also shows that the story of the referendum particularly in war-raked eastern Turkey where Erdogan benefited from a notable swing in his favor from mostly Kurdish voters isnt straightforward.

The narrowness of the 51 percent victory and irregularities surrounding it led to a damning preliminary report from international monitors and a rare challenge to the result.

In the Kurdish east, though, theres another set of concerns: physical and economic security and even the nature of democracy in patriarchal villages. That makes it hard to discern how much of the winning margin was secured by what opponents are calling manipulation and what was down to calculated self-interest.

Under Pressure

Oztekin and other Kurdish leaders from the Peoples Democratic Party, or HDP, in the eastern district of Kozluk said their observers were blocked from monitoring 17 of the regions approximately 120 polling stations. In the village of Oyuktas and elsewhere, he said, officials from the governing Justice and Development Party and security forces brought intense pressure on voters to vote yes.

Some stations reported a remarkable 100 percent vote for the pro-Erdogan yes side, or as few as one or two no ballots to 200 or 300 in favor. Others showed more votes cast than the polling stations had voters registered.

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In his victory speech on Sunday, Erdogan thanked voters in the southeast for what he said was a 10 to 20 percent boost in his support there, compared with levels in the last general election in 2015. Since that time the area has been torn by renewed warfare between state security forces and the Kurdistan Workers Party, better known as the PKK, a listed terrorist organization. It isnt immediately clear why that history should endear the government to ordinary Kurds.

They put so much pressure on people and used all of the power of the state, but I still dont think this 51 percent is correct, said Cuneyt Yildiz, 53, a film maker.

A bulldozed area of Sur, sits on the outskirts of Diyarnbakir in Eastern Turkey, on April 18, 2017.

Photographer: Marc Champion/Bloomberg

Destruction

Yildizs two houses and livelihood were destroyed during the governments battle to drive PKK forces out of Sur, a district of about 10,000 inhabitants on the outskirts of the regional capital, Diyarbakir. Residents are now dependent on handouts and the promise of compensation for their lost homes, with officials strongly hinting a yes vote would produce better treatment, said Yildiz.

The region is still under emergency rule and curfews are widespread. As many as half a million people have been displaced in total. Access to towns such as Lice and Kulp, which also recorded zero no votes in some polling stations, remains blocked due to continued fighting in the area.

In Silvan, a town of 40,000 on one of Turkeys main east-west highways, a convoy of three armored cars was on patrol Wednesday evening, their gun turrets spinning watchfully.

This region feels as though it is under occupation, said Nevzat Oezgen, an HDP board member in Diyarbakir. There was no political campaigning or democracy going on here.

Nevzat Oezgen, a Diyarbakir board member of the Kurdish Peoples Democracy Party, or HDP, poses at his office on April 18, 2017.

Photographer: Marc Champion/Bloomberg

And yet, while evidence of apparent ballot fraud during the referendum mounts, there are other factors that may have boosted the yesvote here.

In Oyuktas, local elders denied any violence was used against Oztekin, a fellow Kurd whose brother fought and died with the PKK in the nearby mountains. But he was an outsider who they said had failed to ask the headmans permission to enter the polling station and wanted to canvass for the HDP.

That could have upset their own way of deciding how their village should vote.

Mustafa Altas, the deputy headman, or muhtar, said electoral decisions are taken collectively, with elders meeting each other over glasses of tea to discuss how various parts of the villages large extended family should vote.

Jailed Leaders

In 2015, that choice was overwhelmingly for the HDP, because its charismatic new leader, Selahattin Demirtas, was promising a democratic path to peace and economic stability for Kurds, Altas said. Then war broke out between the government and the PKK. Demirtas is now in jail along with dozens of other HDP activists from Kozluk and hundreds nationwide, accused of supporting the PKK.

The elders opted to hedge their bets. We decided to vote 220 for yes and 135 for no, said Altas. He voted yes, and as no voters joined the discussion they insisted there had been no pressure from the muhtars to change their minds. The HDP can do nothing for us now, and we will give our votes to whomever can help us, said Altas. The actual result was 219 to 134.

Such collective voting in highly patriarchal Kurdish villages also appears to have worked the other way, with some polling stations around Kozluk opposed to handing Erdogan greater powers by as much as 249 to four.

Mustafa Altas, deputy headman of the village ofOyuktas, second right, stands with villagers in Oyuktas, Turkey, on April 19, 2017.

Photographer: Marc Champion/Bloomberg

Many of those displaced by fighting in Kurdish nationalist strongholds such as Sur simply couldnt return to their registered homes to vote, while a smaller Kurdish party switched allegiance to the yes campaign. Even some of the villages that were unanimous in support of Erdogan proved less mysterious on inspection. One was the hometown of an AKP lawmaker and staunchly loyal to him.

An hourlong drive into mountains on a vertiginous road that required removing rock falls to pass found voters in hamlets around Akcali only too proud to say that none had opted for no. They were Arabs, originally from Iraq, thankful to Erdogan for building their winding road and providing them with electricity and water.

With so much violence in and around Turkey, Kurds switched to vote yes because they increasingly see one man rule as the best way to retrieve stability and build the economy, said Turkan Gurler, an AKP board member for Diyarbakir and wife of a wealthy local businessman.

They love Tayyip Baba, she said.

The narrow and contested nature of Erdogans victory, which has left the geopolitically critical nation more bitterly divided than ever, makes that seem at best optimistic, however.

All politics are lies, said Altas. Now the referendum is over, things can get back to normal.

with assistance from Benjamin Harvey and Sam Dodge

Read more from the original source:
Guns, Votes and Clans: How One Corner of Turkey Elevated ... - Bloomberg

Among Arabs, Diverging Views on Turkey's Erdogan Wall Street Journal (subscription) ISTANBULSyrian merchant Bassel Fouad was once active in the opposition to his country's president, Bashar al-Assad, and sees him as a tyrant who destroyed Syria with his iron-fisted authoritarian rule. Mr. Fouad, who now lives in southern Turkey ...

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Among Arabs, Diverging Views on Turkey's Erdogan - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

ISTANBUL In the wake of an otherwise bitter defeat, Turkeys opposition parties found a silver lining: They had denied President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the thumping victory he craved in Sundays referendum on expanding his powers.

With nearly half of the country opposing the constitutional changes 51 percent voted in favor it seemed to provide a rare opening for Turkeys perennially weak opposition to challenge Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, a finely tuned, election-winning machine.

There was a problem, though: There may be no one to lead such a challenge.

Key opposition leaders are viewed as too soft to confront Turkeys hard-nosed leader or too narrow in their politics to gain broadappeal. And two of the countrys most dynamic opposition figures, both from the pro-Kurdish Peoples Democratic Party, were thrown into jail by the government last year.

In the referendum, voters were asked to choose yes or no on a set of constitutional changes that would change Turkeys system of government from parliamentary to presidential, a transformation that would give Erdogan vast new authority. The yes side won by more than 1 million votes.

Mahmut Ekinci, a retired lawyer who in past elections had voted for Turkeys main opposition party, the Republican Peoples Party, or CHP, said he voted for Erdogans side because it endowed Turkey with a strong leader.

CHP head Kemal Kilicdaroglu was gentlemanly, Ekinci said. A leader? No.

[What Erdogans narrow referendum victory means for Turkey]

The questions about the strength and ability of the opposition are especially urgent at a time when public debate about the razor-thin victory margin is raging, as are allegations by opposition parties and international observers that the vote was marred by ballot irregularities and other violations.

Erdogans opponents have a brief period in which to demonstrate their resolve to the electorate before he consolidates his hold on the levers of state, including the judiciary, and indelibly shapes the narrative of his referendum victory, analysts said.

The window may already be closing. On Wednesday, in a major setback for several opposition parties, the election board rejected their petitions to annul the results of the referendum over the panels decision to accept ballots lacking an official seal.

Also Wednesday, authorities detained dozens of people who had joined in protests that followed the referendum.

Erdogan and senior government officials say the vote is a settled matter. The public had spoken clearly, they say, no matter how narrow the margin of victory, and it was time to move on.

It doesnt matter if you win 1-0 or 5-0, Erdogan, a former semiprofessional soccer player, told CNN on Tuesday. The ultimate goal is to win the game.

Meanwhile, Erdogans government received an important boost from the Trump administration after the vote. On Monday, President Trump called Erdogan and congratulated him on the referendum win. And Wednesday, Turkish and U.S. officials said Trump and Erdogan would meet before the NATO summit in Brussels next month.

[Erdogan and Modi arent the Trumps of the East]

Some of the doubts about the Turkish opposition have focused on Kilicdaroglu, the courtly, soft-spoken head of the CHP. With his staid manner and background as a former bureaucrat, he was widely seen as no match for the sharp-tongued Erdogan, a savvy populist and tireless campaigner.

Even so, many supporters have credited Kilicdaroglu for the strategy that ensured the close result: making sure the CHP kept as low a profile as possible, to deny its critics a target for attacks.

The strategy was smart and acknowledged the partys disadvantages, said Asli Aydintasbas, an Istanbul-based fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. At the same time, she said, it doesnt say great things about a political party that they have to keep a low profile.

There were other missteps by the CHP, she said, including its failure to comprehensively monitor polling stations in some parts of the country, its frequently ad hoc ground strategy during the campaign and a botched statement by Kilicdaroglu about a failed coup last summer that may have cost his side votes.

And in the last two weeks of the campaign, Erdogan upended the CHP strategy by focusing on Kilicdaroglu framing every criticism of the proposed changes as a spurious accusation by a feckless opposition leader, while criticizing Kilicdaroglus past performance in government, leading the national social security agency.

The subtext was, I may be an autocrat, but this guy is completely incompetent, Aydintasbas said.

Enis Berberoglu, a CHP lawmaker from Istanbul, called Erdogans focus on Kilicdaroglu cheap and said it had demonized the opposition leader just one example of an unfair campaign in which the president and his allies also had associated their opponents with terrorists, he said.

Going forward, the CHP would focus on making clear what happened during the election, Berberoglu said. The public would be watching what we do in the courts, on the streets, in meetings, he said.

Murat Yetkin, a political analyst and editor of the daily Hurriyet News, said the CHP leadership seemed to be doing everything it could on the legal front to force an investigation of the alleged voting irregularities, while also preventing a risky confrontation with pro-government forces by keeping its supporters from demonstrating in large numbers.

But perceptions will be hard to change. Days after the referendum, Kilicdaroglu had become a sensation on the Internet but not in the way he might have hoped. On social media, Turks passed around memes depicting the CHP leader as reacting mutedly to alarming things surrounding him, including Darth Vader and the creature from the film Alien seen on-screen bursting through someones chest.

Read more:

Journalism is becoming powerless: Inside a nervous Turkish newsroom as the government closes in

Turkish battle over executive presidency prompts tensions with the Netherlands and divisions at home

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Excerpt from:
As Erdogan gains power in Turkey, a weakened opposition tries to stand in his way - Washington Post

NEW YORK Any media outlet telling you that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoanlegitimately won the referendum vote is complicit in a historic fraud.

The free world has refused to get literate in the ways wily despots overpower the state and willingly overlooked the Putin-Chvez-Erdoan formula now in vogue: a servile media, judiciary and military; oligarchs owning the economy as proxies for the leader; a political opposition allowed to hobble around theatrically; subsidized trolls and bots shape-shifting the opinion-scape; and manufactured plebiscites precisely calibrated with myriad little tricks to produce the right outcome.

Were in the midst of a totalitarian resurgence; this is how its done in the new millennium.

Even after a heavily lopsided campaign, Erdoan has had to depend on stuffed ballot boxes. Some 1.5 million votes are currently being contested, a number that pretty much covers the margin of his 1.3-million-vote victory. Astonishingly, Turkeys electoral board announced that it would accept boxes full of ballots but without seals all such boxes thus far discovered being, mirabile dictu, full of Yes votes.

They didnt even have the good sense to generate a few illicit No boxes to sully the picture. Even more astonishingly, at one point, the same electoral authority publicly stated that such unsealed boxes had been counted in previous elections. Let that sink in for a long moment.

But thats a small quibble. The full scope of the Erdoan governments cheating has yet to emerge. How many Syrian refugees out of the 3 million living in the country were quickly enfranchised for the purpose? How many ballot centers were moved around in the Kurdish areas in recent weeks to complicate voting? Who will investigate the Erdoan governments multiple rigging strategies? The same high election council that his government has stuffed with sycophants.

A march at the Kadikoy district in Istanbul against the constitutional reform | Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images

I havent yet mentioned the hundreds of thousands jailed, intimidated and sacked; the scores of opposition candidates beaten up in the lead-up to the referendum. Lets not forget, also, the spastic remnants of media opposition prevented from arguing the No side with details of Erdoans family corruption, his incompetence in every foreign policy venture, his U-turns over Bashar al-Assad, Israel, Russia and his alienation of all Turkeys former strategic allies.

Not to mention the oddly hysterical incidents in Germany and the Netherlands, where various AKP ministers close to Erdoan rather operatically got themselves outlawed from conducting rallies. The entire exercise was clearly designed as a noisy farce. While Erdoan chastised the Dutch for suppressing democracy, for supporting Hitler in World War II and the like, similar scenes occurred in Germany, also home to large a large population of expatriate Turks who, it comes as no surprise, voted Yes by a large margin.

A government that endangers the welfare of its citizens abroad like this is capable of anything. The Turkish consular authorities supervising ballots in Germany and the Netherlands have long been hand-picked Erdoanists. You dont have to be a conspiracy nut to wonder about vote-rigging there as numbers were transferred back to Ankara.

Erdoans relentless political chicanery offers a roadmap to todays populist dictators on how to engineer apparently democratic triumphs on their way to disabling democracy.

Erdoan deliberately provoked chaos then offered himself up as a solution. He allowed ISIS to operate openly in Turkey; he ignited a civil war against the Kurdish population to punish them for voting against him in a crucial national election; he kept the Syrian border porous so the instability there would migrate into Turkey. He persecuted the military until they revolted, accusing outside forces of fomenting the trouble, most recently the Glenists. With rolling Robespierre-like prosecutions, he warned half the country that opposing him will wreck their lives. He destroyed the economy but subsidized his supporters.

The only way Erdoan has achieved any political success is by using the body politic against itself. In essence, he has delegitimized governance in order to present himself as the only way to restore it.

Erdogan supporters cheer him following the referendum vote count | Turkish government via EPA

But in so doing, he has also entirely delegitimized himself. After all the bludgeoning, he eked out a dodgy razor-thin majority in a kangaroo plebiscite. He and other AKP leaders spoke optimistically about inclusion after declaring (early) victory, claiming the result would benefit all Turks. Only losers complain about fairness, they said.

And theres the rub in the murky political psychology of the new era, successful retention of power, even successful election-rigging, denotes a kind of virtue when chaos is the threatened alternative. The strongmans promise of continuity, stability and firmness especially while he causes turbulence matters more than legitimacy, indeed equals legitimacy.

Winning pseudo-elections justifies all abuses in retrospect. The leader never quite feels legitimate and spends the states resources incessantly trying to gain it by whatever means. Eerily familiar, no? Get used to it in Turkey and around the world.

Melik Kaylan is a foreign affairs columnist for Forbes.com and co-author of The Russia-China Axis: The New Cold War (Encounter Books, 2014).

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Erdoan's power grab follows authoritarian script - POLITICO.eu