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All that could possibly go wrong with a dignitary visit went wrong even before Turkish President Recep Erdogan arrived in India. It was touted as a visit by a leader who seems to be set to stay, right wing, authoritarian, controversial but clearly there was, or at least should have been, a reason for the effort undertaken by both governments to facilitate Erdogans trip to India.

However, by the time he left New Delhi-Ankara relations were left in tatters with both sides clearly wondering what had been achieved by the diplomatic exercise.

The world is re-assessing its relations with Turkey after Erdogan swept back into power. Even the European Union that had drawn a distance away has had discussions on its relationship with the authoritarian President accused of violating citizens rights, with a larger meeting scheduled on precisely this issue. US President Donald Trump has moved to improve relations with Turkey, a strong voice in West Asia and an enemy of Americas declared enemies like Syria.

Clearly the effort undertaken by New Delhi was to follow the same footprints, and reach out to Erdogan despite his dismal record in human rights, and in bolstering the war in Syria. In fact several Syrian diplomats and political leaders have spoken to this reporter about the role played by Turkey in supplying arms and money to prop up the insurgent groups, and thereby strengthening the Islamic State steadily over the years. This has been documented extensively and is now part of accepted records. In fact, the Kurds have held press conferences and issued statements of how Erdogan used the excuse of IS to bomb the Kurds and thereby weaken the fight against the Islamic State.

New Delhi while keeping relations open with all, had been supportive of Syria through the war. Perhaps not to the extent that Damascus expected, but to a point where India kept its head over the controversial waters and kept relations with the Assad regime intact.

Erdogans visit has cut both ends. Syria and Iran in particular are extremely unhappy about the New Delhi decision to invite and entertain Erdogan at this stage, when the US attack on them has sharpened. And relations with Turkey have dipped considerably to what Syrian leaders insist is a point of no return.

Turkey is also seen as a newfriend of Israel in West Asia, a position that might endear Erdogan to the west but that certainly makes him suspect in the eyes of most countries in the region. Ties between the leaders are on a fairly sound footing now. This, diplomatic sources, was also one of the reasons why New Delhi extended the invitation seeing it to be part of the US-Israel-Japan-Australia- possibly Turkey axis that is being explored here.

However, New Delhi itself queered the pitch by first inviting, and then scheduling a visit by the President of Cyprus Nicos Anastasiades to India shortly before Erdogan arrived. On the streets of Istanbul the anger with Cyprus is as palpable, as is the anger in Syria against Turkey. And while of course, India has the sovereign right to do what it wants, in diplomacy relations depend heavily on such sensitivities and niceties. Relations between Cyprus and Turkey are non-existent and this would have most certainly been seen in Ankara as a slight.

Former Ambassador M.Bhadrakumar believes that this is a primary reason why Erdogan threw all caution to the winds and raised the issue of Kashmir before he left for India. And he insisted on raising the Kashmir issue, that he would have most probably done so before the visit. Of course Turkey has supported Pakistan on the issue of Kashmir, but here Bhadrakumar points to a willingness by Turkey to dehyphenate India and Pakistan.

As he says, the Cyprus question is as complicated as our Kashmir problem where religion, ethnicity, national identity and geopolitics get hopelessly intertwined. Turkeys stance on Kashmir became pro-Pakistan in a pronounced way following (non-aligned) Indias robust support for (non-aligned) Cyprus against the Turkish invasion and occupation in 1974. Unsurprisingly, Pakistan happened to be one of the handful of countries that supported Northern Cyprus.Nonetheless, Turkeys antipathy toward India mellowed over time and its militant secularism put limits on its friendship with Pakistan. When Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit accepted PM Atal Bihari Vajpayees invitation to visit India in 2001, he spurned an invitation by then Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to visit Pakistan as well.

This visit has set the clock back as Eerdogans controversial remarks offering to mediate on Kashmir, and his declared warmth towards Pakistan, came to the forefront. This placed New Delhi too on the defensive, and although protocol was followed, and meetings took place it is clear that Erdogan has returned to Ankara with Kashmir and not New Delhi on his agenda. This will also be an issue that will endear him to other countries in the region, and as the sources here said, something that we will hear more about from Turkey.

In the process, the visit has :

Disclaimer:The views expressed here are the author's personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Newsclick.

Originally posted here:
Erdogan Visit: A Diplomatic Disaster - NewsClick

Financial Times

Erdogan's blacklist Financial Times After the coup was thwarted, few at the time blamed Mr Erdogan for hunting down those behind it. Ohal was originally sold to the Turkish people as a temporary measure. But after winning a referendum increasing his powers last month, Mr Erdogan extended ... No end in sight for Erdogan's purges after referendum - Al-MonitorAl-Monitor all 5 news articles »

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Erdogan's blacklist - Financial Times

Dozens of suspects accused of trying to assassinate the Turkish president during last years botched coup attempt will remain in jail pending their trial and have been denied bail, a court in southwestern Turkey ruled yesterday.

44 members of the military squad involved in the plot who are believed to have been ordered to capture or kill President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were previously remanded in custody to face trial.

The Second Heavy Penal Court in Mugla also decided that Energy Minister Berat Albayrak, who is also Erdogans son-in-law, can join the trial as a plaintiff.

Last year, on 15 July, in the midst of the coup attempt, Erdogan told the nation on live television that he had narrowly escaped an attempt on his life when the hotel in Marmaris where he had been staying was bombed only 15 minutes after he left.

Turkey survived a deadly coup attempt on 15 July by rogue elements within the military that killed 249 people and injured nearly 2,200 others.

Responding to a rallying cry by Erdogan, Turkish citizens valiantly took to the streets that night and became the biggest factor in ensuring the failure of the attempted overthrow of the democratically elected government.

Turkeys government has repeatedly said the coup attempt was organized by US-based preacher Fetullah Gulen and what the Turkish government now terms as the Fetullah Terrorist Organisation, or FETO.

Gulen is accused of a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through the infiltration of Turkish institutions, particularly the military, police, and judiciary, forming what is commonly known as the parallel state.

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Failed Erdogan assassins to stay in jail - Middle East Monitor

Suddenly the world is full of leaders from Theresa May to President Erdogan of Turkey claiming to unite their countries while visibly deepening their divisions. Denunciations of supposed threats at home and abroad are a common feature of this new political style, whether they are tweeted from the White House or spoken at the podium outside 10 Downing Street.

Threats against Britain have been issued by European politicians and officials, said May this week, accusing them of deliberately trying to influence the results of the general election on 8 June. All this sounded very like Hillary Clinton convinced that Russia helped lose her the presidential election, though in the case of Britain any such calculation is highly unlikely given the common European assumption that Mrs May is going to win a landslide victory.

Defending the motherland against the evil schemes of foreigners is a political gambit that has been played out countless times since the age of Pericles, but its impact depends on the political context in which it is used. At the moment, it is peculiarly destructive as ethnic nationalism reasserts itself as a vehicle for grievances and rivalry between different nation states is reaching new heights. Populist nationalist leaders from Manilla to Warsaw to Washington are promising more than they can deliver and looking for scapegoats at home and abroad to blame when things go wrong. Nationalism has always needed real or invented threats to super-charge communal solidarity.

In an age of reinvigorated nation states, English nationalism is more dangerous than it looks. It displaces a vaguer and more inclusive British nationalism, dislocating Englands relations with Scotland and Northern Ireland. It may well be that Scotland will not become independent or Northern Ireland unite with the Irish Republic, but these options are already feasible enough to preoccupythe British state.

Theresa May's full statement marking the dissolution of Parliament

One destructive element in English nationalism is seldom identified. People in England understandably resent the way that their nationalism, which they see as merely sticking up for their own interests, is condemned as racist and jingoistic when Scottish and Irish nationalism (or for that matter Algerian and Vietnamese nationalism) are given a free passas the laudable pursuit of liberty and self-determination.

There is something in this, but there is a difference between the nationalism of weak countries, whose history is one of foreign conquest and occupation, and the nationalism of larger and stronger ones who did the conquering and the occupying. Smaller countries or embattled communities always play with a weaker hand of political cards than their opponents and cannot do what they like, but this has the advantage of giving them a good grasp of the realities of power.

But states like the US, Britain, France and Russia who have an imperial past or present,have a much less accurate sense of what is feasible and what is not. Their nationalism is coloured by self-justifying myths about their own superiority and the inferiority of others. This is not just distasteful but carries the seeds of frustration and defeat. The British empire fatally underestimating the resistance of Afghans and Boers in the 19th century and the Irish, Indians and Greek Cypriots, among others, in the 20th century.

One could see the same self-destructive arrogance at work more recently in Iraq after 2003 and in Afghanistan after 2006. Public opinion at home never took on board the extent of British failure there was more complete than that of the Americans. In Iraq, the British force ended up signing a humiliating agreement with a Shia militia. No lessons were learned from defeat, as witness Boris Johnsons glib promise to join the US in attacking President Assad.

Much of this sabre-rattling over the last week is simply part of Britains long-standing effort since 1940 to demonstrate its continuing usefulness as the main foreign ally of the US. But here again the political landscape is changing in a way not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. US international leadership under Donald Trump is mercurial and unpredictable and Britain needs to rethink its policies in the Middle East according to a report by the House of Lords international relations select committee this week. Its chairman, the former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Howell, says that in a world less automatically dominated by the US underpinning security in the region, it is no longer right to have a stance at every stage of if we just get on with the US everything will be alright.

This is all very true, but does not answer questions about whether or not Britain, if it does not piggy-back on US military power, has the inclination and resources to play a more independent role.

There are other doubts about how far British power and influence will survive post-Brexit. Not many Leave voters will have truly believed in Shakespearean rhapsodies about England as a precious stone set in the silver sea.But the proponents of Brexit were always cavalier about where Britain outside the EU would stand in a world which is getting more unstable. Appeals of varying degrees of sophistication to the spirit of 1940forget that British victory in the Napoleonic wars and both World Wars depended on the Royal Navy and on building up a network of alliances with other powers. Having spurned the EU, this latter strategy is going to be very difficult to pursue. Already May, Johnson and assorted royals have been scurrying off to see unsavoury allies in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and among the kleptocratic monarchs of the Gulf.

One aspect of British decline is underrated: people favouring or opposing Brexit both speak in the future tense about the benefits or disasters that will ensue as Britain negotiates its departure. But one of the worst consequences of the decision is already with us and is simply that the British Government is wholly focused on Brexit to the exclusion of everything else.

Mrs Mays explanation that she called the general election to strengthen her hand in negotiating with Brussels is an admission of the dominance of the issue. There is not going to be much time to consider new policies for a changing Middle East or for anything else.

How did all this happen? In many respects, globalisation has turned out to be more destructive to the status quo than communism everwas. In its name,nationalism was discarded and derided by ruling elites who had an economically respectable reason to distance themselves from the rest of society and did not see that they were cutting through the branch on which they were sitting. The left never much liked nationalism, suspecting it of being a mask for racism and a diversion from more important social and economic issues. Populist nationalists came to power in country after country as others retreated from nationalism and they filled the vacuum.

The enhanced rivalry of nation states will be more destructive and violent than what went before. It is not just because of Donald Trump that the whole the world is becoming more mercurial and unstable. Everywhere divisive leaders are proposing radical changes that will exacerbate divisions.

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World leaders from May to Trump to Erdogan are all promising to unite their countries while doing the exact opposite - The Independent

Published time: 2 May, 2017 13:50 Edited time: 3 May, 2017 09:45

Turkey will say goodbye to the EU if it refuses to open new chapters on its accession into the bloc, President Erdogan has stated. It comes after an EU commissioner said Ankaras actions and policies have made it impossible to meet EU criteria to join.

From now on there is no option other than opening the chapters you have not yet opened. If you do not open [them], goodbye, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a Tuesday ceremony to mark his return to the ruling AK Party, as quoted by Reuters.

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His comments came after European Commissioner Johannes Hahn, who oversees EU membership bids, told Reuters that Turkeys limits on press freedom, mass jailing, and diminishing civil rights have made it almost impossible for Turkey to meet EU joining criteria.

Hahn said on Tuesday that EU rules are not negotiable, and that the bloc will not put aside the human rights situation in discussions with Ankara.

Everybodys clear that, currently at least, Turkey is moving away from a European perspective, Hahn said.

There is no version of Turkish democracy. There is only democracy. Turkish people have the same rights to live in freedom as Europeans do.

He stated that the focus of the relationship between the bloc and Ankara has to be something else we have to see what could be done in the future, to see if we can restart some kind of cooperation.

Ankara and Brussels have been in talks for years over the possibility of Turkey joining the EU. The already slow negotiations were stalled even further following Erdogans sweeping crackdown after a failed coup in July 2016.

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Relations have since become even more strained following last months referendum results, which allow Erdogan to be granted sweeping powers when it comes to national matters of legislation, finance, appointments, and civil society. The European Commission has called for an investigation into alleged voting irregularities.

Last year, Ankara agreed to a landmark migrant deal with the bloc which would see it take back all illegal migrants landing in Greece from its shores, in exchange for accelerated talks on becoming a member of the bloc and billions in refugee assistance from the EU.

Turkey also rallied for visa-free travel to Europes Schengen zone as part of the deal, but was told by the EU that a list of 72 conditions must first be met a key sticking point of which is Turkeys strict anti-terrorism laws, which Europe has said must be loosened in order for that agreement to go ahead.

Erdogan has repeatedly threatened to destroy the deal if Brussels does not hold up its end of the agreement, a move which could see Europe once again struggling to deal with an overwhelming influx of refugees.

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Erdogan threatens to say goodbye to EU as official warns ...