Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Blog

The Paradoxes of Turkish Democracy

By Meltem Muftuler-Bac and Yannis Stivachtis

For the foreign observer, Turkey is a highly interesting country where European and Islamic cultures live in an integrated fashion. Its uniqueness stems from its imperial past, and the development of a secular democracy in a country where the population is predominantly Muslim. Turkey’s position in the European order has been firmly established since the end of the Second World War as Turkey joined the Council of Europe in 1948, the OECD in 1949 and NATO in 1952. It is interesting to point out that Turkey was an integral part of Europe and the Western order while, for example, Spain and Portugal were not.

Turkey’s political destiny has changed with the end of the Cold War in 1989. Even though it was still part of the European architecture, its position as an integral part of Europe became under serious scrutiny. The Turkish candidacy and the subsequent opening of accession negotiations with the EU in 2005 were important milestones in the Turkish endeavor to fully belong to Europe. The EU accession process has brought significant pressures into the Turkish political system as the Turkish political norms and rules are different than the European norms. These differences are most visible when the Turkish norms on the ‘supremacy of the state’ and ‘the national identity’ are being challenged by the norms of liberal democracy such as freedom of expression and individual rights and liberties. These differences become highly controversial when the Turkish governments since 1999 began to adopt political reforms that would enable Turkey to meet the political aspects of the Copenhagen criteria.

When the European Commission declared in its 2004 Progress Report for Turkey that “Turkey sufficiently fulfills the Copenhagen criteria’; this was in response to the vast political changes in Turkey adopted in order for accession negotiations for EU membership to begin. Nonetheless, Turkey still had serious problems in its political system stemming from the restrictions on freedom of expression, most notably the Article 301 which foresees legal action against those who insult ‘Turkishness.’ The very vague implication of Article 301 has enabled the ultra-nationalists in Turkey who are skeptical of the EU accession process to petition for cases against the political reformers or intellectuals. Even though most of these cases are dismissed and never come to court, as long as such articles remain in place, Turkey’s democracy is criticized by the EU as falling behind the European standards. As long as such legal changes are not adopted, Turkey’s EU accession might be problematic. However, an equally important aspect of political change is that the norms on freedom of expression and individual rights need to be internalized by the Turkish public. In other words, only changing or amending the Constitution will not suffice. The process of norm diffusion is a much longer process that needs to involve the different segments of the Turkish society.

Meltem Muftuler-Bac is a professor of international relations and the Jean Monnet Chair at Sabanci University in Istanbul. Yannis Stivachtis is an associate professor of international relations and director of the International Studies Program at Virginia Tech. They are co-editors of Turkey-European Union Relations (Lexington Books, 2008).

Operation Condor’s Lessons for the “War on Terror”

By J. Patrice McSherry

International attention is focusing again on Operation Condor, the Cold War-era covert network of U.S.-backed military regimes in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, later joined by Ecuador and Peru. The anticommunist Condor apparatus carried out a program of transnational political repression against exiled political opponents during the 1970s. Multinational Condor squads crossed into one another’s territory to carry out hundreds of disappearances, illegal cross-border transfers, tortures, and assassinations, including one in Washington, D.C. Condor’s targets included pro-democracy activists, unionists, Christian Democrat leaders, constitutionalist military officers, former ministers, and critics of the military regimes as well as guerrillas. Today in Latin America and Europe several trials of former Condor commanders and operatives are underway. One Italian judge recently called for the extradition of some 140 military and intelligence officers from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and elsewhere for cross-border Condor crimes.

One recent news report highlighted the 1980 abductions of Noemi Gianetti de Molfino, a former Mother of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina, and three other Argentines in Peru. U.S. officials knew of their capture by a joint Peruvian-Argentine commando, and one had advance knowledge of Condor's plan for the “permanent disappearance” of the Argentines. I discovered this document in the course of my research for a book published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2005, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America. No steps were taken to avert the murder of the four.

In the course of my research on the repressive Condor system over the last fourteen years I have spoken to a number of survivors. They tell of abductions in the middle of the night, sadistic tortures they suffered at the hands of Condor teams, and the despair they endured in squalid secret prisons. Today, as we witness our own government using extralegal means such as abductions and cross-border transfers (“extraordinary rendition”), “waterboarding,” and incommunicado detention in Guantánamo and other secret “black sites,” their stories are painfully relevant.

In fact, I uncovered significant evidence of secret U.S. support for, and collaboration with, Operation Condor in the 1970s. During the Cold War, anticommunism often overrode human rights in Washington’s policy calculus. U.S. policy-makers feared that progressive or nationalist movements in the developing world were communist-inspired, and cultivated anticommunist allies who shared U.S. strategic interests. Declassified documents suggest that U.S. military and intelligence officials considered the Condor system to be an effective weapon in the hemispheric anticommunist crusade. It seems that a similar mentality prevails today among some of those in government.

In the 1970s Defense Department and CIA personnel had up-to-the-minute knowledge of Condor operations. One Defense Intelligence Agency report of October 1976 discussed a secret Argentine-Uruguayan intelligence operation in which members of an opposition organization of Uruguayans in Buenos Aires were abducted. The report noted that “a very secret phase of ‘Operation Condor’ involves the formation of special teams from member countries who are to carry out operations including assassinations….A special team has apparently been organized in Argentina…structured much like a U.S. Special Forces Team.”

Perhaps the most significant document I uncovered in my research was a report indicating that Condor was granted authorized access to the U.S. continental communications system housed in the Panama Canal Zone. The 1978 cable, from U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White to the Secretary of State, reported that the commander of Paraguay’s armed forces had told him that intelligence chiefs from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay used “an encrypted system within the U.S. telecommunications net[work],” which covered all of Latin America, to communicate and coordinate intelligence—and presumably operations against Condor targets. Essentially, U.S. military and/or intelligence forces put the official U.S. communications channel at the disposal of Operation Condor. The conclusion was unavoidable: such collaboration reflected high-level approval of the Condor apparatus.

Why did Washington support the military dictatorships of the Cold War era and collaborate with Condor? Clearly, top U.S. policy-makers considered such support to be in the U.S. interest. But that time of terror resulted in the destruction of democracy and widespread human rights atrocities that still reverberate in Latin America. Today there are many disturbing echoes of Operation Condor in the so-called war on terror. Again it is argued that the ends justify the means. But Operation Condor should have made clear that egregious violations of human rights and the rule of law are not the means to any good end.

J. Patrice McSherry, author of Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America, is professor of political science and director of the Latin American & Caribbean Studies program at Long Island University.

Witchcraft, Magic, and Superstition in Europe

By Michael D. Bailey
      
            History is often obsessed with beginnings and endings, some more real than others. The Roman Empire fell in 476 when the Germanic warlord Odoacer deposed the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus. The Reformation began in 1517 when Martin Luther issued his Ninety-Five Theses. The United States was inaugurated with a pen-stroke on July 4, 1776, and the ancient régime fell when the Bastille succumbed to the Parisian mob on July 14, 1789. In 1782, Anna Göldi, a Swiss maidservant, was executed for witchcraft in what is generally regarded as the last fully legal witch trial in Europe. The museum recently opened to honor her in the Canton of Glarus, therefore, memorializes not just any victim of the witch hunts, but Europe’s “last witch.”

           Switzerland has a fair claim to being site of the beginning as well as the end of the European witch hunts, for in the mid-fifteenth century Alpine lands witnessed both the construction of the stereotype of diabolical witchcraft – that is, of witches as demon-worshiping, sabbat-attending servants of Satan – and some of the first applications of that stereotype in trials. Yet these beginnings and endings, and indeed the entire history of European witchcraft, tell only a small part of a much larger story. Belief in the real existence and power of supernatural spirits (demons among them) and of occult natural forces (such as might be contained in witches’ potions and poisons) has been a major aspect of human culture, and certainly of European culture at least until characteristically modern forms of rationality emerged during the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Perennial too has been the belief that human beings could access and manipulate such power via words and rites, as well as the conviction that certain people would utilize such power for evil ends, and that society needed to be protected from them.

             In my recent book Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present,I have tried to set the important and dismal story of the European witch hunts within this larger history. I have also tried to tell a story without artificial beginnings and endings. I begin in the depths of antiquity and proceed to the twenty-first century. My purpose is not to chart the movement through time of some static construct that modern opinion might label “magic” or “witchcraft,” but rather to trace how successive societies and cultures constructed and categorized such practices, taking into account both what contemporaries might understand as magical (even when they employed no such word) and what modern minds might perceive in the past. I saw no reason to stop in the eighteenth century, with the advent of the Enlightenment, because magical beliefs and practices persist in modern Europe and North America. Modern magical groups, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the early twentieth century, or modern witches (Wiccans) in the twenty-first are often regarded as being wholly separate from the magicians and witches of the past. They certainly occupy a different position in society, and in many ways arise from specifically modern cultural currents. Yet they are nonetheless very much a part of the not-yet-ended history of magic in the West.

Michael D. Bailey is assistant professor of history at Iowa State University.

UEFA Efforts to Eliminate Racism

By Christos Kassimeris

Racism has long tarnished the game of football in quite a few European countries, though it seems that it has recently emerged with a new -– even uglier -– face, since a number of racist incidents now involve not only fans but players and officials as well. The apparent lack of ethos that characterizes a section of fans, predominantly, has certainly disturbed national and European football governing bodies alike. Nevertheless, their attempts to rid the popular game off all forms of discrimination have rarely been crowned with success. Even though some players and clubs have already been fined by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), racist incidents across the continent continue to blemish football. It is not surprising, therefore, that Michel Platini, President of UEFA, has condemned the phenomenon of racism in football on more than one occasion, ever since his election on January 2007, while also emphasizing UEFA’s commitment to secure a racism-free environment in all European stadiums. In this respect, it is important to note that his determination to combat racism in European football is likely to materialize following his latest statements. Platini recently declared that UEFA would openly support any referee’s decision to bring a football match to an abrupt end, after having consulted the match delegate, when fans engage in racist chanting or abuse a player in a similar fashion. For the record, Rene Temmink belongs to that rare breed of referees that took such action in a game between ADO Den Haag and PSV Eindhoven during the 2005-2006 Dutch football season. Such measures may, indeed, prove more successful than previous UEFA-sponsored tactics to eliminate racism from football, such as the Ten Point Plan of Action for Professional Football Clubs, intended to promote the participation of ethnic minority communities in football. In any case, Platini’s remarks should be treated with some skepticism. Unless referees are officially backed by UEFA the popular game will only suffer more, given that certain supporters of clubs may not hesitate to resort to racist abuse in order to halt a game that is likely to find their beloved team on the losing side. Hence, supporting such courageous referees should definitely be regarded as the starting point of what would be a promising anti-racism campaign in European football, but ‘support’ alone is clearly insufficient. It is essential that the actions of the men-in-black are followed by severe penalties imposed by the European governing body, regardless of the clubs’ record and status in national or continental competitions. Racism has no place in football and must be eliminated with effect.

Christos Kassimeris is assistant professor in political science and heads the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Cyprus College in Nicosia and author of European Football in Black and White: Tackling Racism in Football forthcoming in December 2007.

Chinese Military Hackers Attack Foreign Government Computers?

By  Xu Wu

First Germany, then United States, then France, then Australia. One after another, countries join the chorus accusing that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was behind the recent malicious attempts to hack into foreign governments’ computer systems. Although by no means bullet-proof, most of the reports, or at least their normally anonymous sources, hinted two “facts”: first, these hacking activities were carried out by Chinese military or its affiliated agencies; second, the Chinese government, or more specifically, some top-level officials, knew about and support these operations. Although not a computer expert, I found both the premises, and the logic, not to mention the conclusion, are problematic.

Suppose, (1) that these hacking activities did occur as accused—let’s ignore the suspicious two- to three-month time lag between the crime and the disclosure; (2) that this kind of online activities is universally rejected, forbidden, loathed, and demeaned, and no civilized country on the earth will engage in this type of low-class, immoral information-gathering intrusions; (3) that these attempts did originate physically from China—(let us just pretend the above conditions are all met, for the sake of discussions)—I still could not figure out how they pinpointed China’s military as the guilty party and blamed the Chinese government for the wrongdoing.    

Here are my reasons, from the technologically amateurish to the politically incorrect. 

First, every morning while sitting before my office computer and checking my online inbox, I have to delete those admirably persistent spam e-mails, normally with a weird name and address. The online administrator at my institution has promised and updated many times the filtering software, but, on average, I still receive more trash e-mails than the useful ones. If the spam spreaders can somehow find a way to evade the cat-and-mouse cyber chase and hide their identities, I don’t know why the “quasi-formidable” Chinese military cyber geeks can not hide. If they are technologically savvy enough to break into some of the most sophisticated computer systems in the world, shouldn’t they know how to use proxy software and other hacking tools to erase the trace? 

Second, even if the perpetrators are indeed Chinese citizens living inside China (Guangzhou and Lanzhou, to be more specific), how can the accusers identify with certainty that those perpetrators were PLA agents, operating with the support of the government? Why couldn’t they be a small group of technologically savvy “cyber nationalists” who initiated these rampant and bald moves? Let us not forget, there are over 140 million online users in China, half of them using broadband fast-speed Internet surfing online. If you still think this scenario is unlikely, take a look at several “historical” events occurred not so long ago. In May 1999, when the news broke that Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was bombed by a U.S. B-2 stealth bomber, a group of self-organized Chinese hackers defaced the website of the U.S. Embassy in China within 12 hours, and knocked out of service the White House’s official website, the first time in its history. Two years later, when diplomats from China and United States were busy tangling on the most appropriate way to say “sorry” over the spy-plane collision incident, an estimated number of 80,000 Chinese hackers participated in the so-called “Red May Self-Defense Cyber Warfare,” fighting with an unknown number of American hackers. Several thousands of business, educational, governmental, even military websites on both sides fell prey to this unprecedented massive cyber-nationalistic anger. In a summary report, New York Times reporter even named this online conflict the “World Wide Web War I.”

It has become a thinking pattern among many Western observers that anything happened in China was the result of Chinese government’s or PLA’s calculated maneuver. Even this assumption seems reasonable twenty years ago, it is fairly outdated nowadays, given the breathtaking development and diversification in China’s economic, societal, cultural, and even political decision-making sectors. A couple of months ago, two Chinese young scholars in different occasions voiced their personal opinions on China’s huge foreign reserve. Because their position was different from the official line, a rain of protests, accusations, warnings, demands were filed in front of Chinese government’s doorsteps. If an American economist can have his or her different view on financial policy, why can’t a Chinese scholar? If opposing China’s political policy belongs to the “freedom of speech,” why opposing China’s monetary policy becomes a “foolhardy” troublemaker?

An interesting analogy can also be made between these online hacking incidents and the ongoing safety issues involving the “made-in-China” products. Yes, those defective products were made in China, but they were not made by the “Chinese government.” Although the government shares the burden of enforcing high-quality regulations, it is those tens of thousands of manufacturers or even those American importers who should be blamed for the lack of quality control and inspection. Also, although the label says “made-in-China,” it is, to a large extent, only assembled in China. In other words, just like those evasive online hackers, unless you catch them blood in hands, who knows where they are from, who they are, and what they are doing for?

Xu Wu is assistant professor of strategic media and public relations at Arizona State University and author of Chinese Cyber Nationalism: Evolution, Characteristics, and Implications.

The Khmer Rouge Trials Are About to Begin

By Benny Widyono

On June 13, 2007, it was announced in Phnom Penh that the long-awaited Khmer Rouge trials are ready to start. Thus ended 27 years of international amnesia over bringing to justice the leaders of the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which during its reign from April 17, 1975, to January 7, 1979, caused the deaths—through mass murder, starvation and forced labor—of 1.7 million to 3 million Cambodians, or a fourth to a third of the country’s population.

During its rule, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot abolished private property, personal possessions, money, leisure, socializing, marriage (except in cadre-approved cases), religion, and all personal liberties. Cambodia became one giant concentration camp consisting of totalitarian rural communes. The day the Khmer Rouge took power, they evacuated the entire population of Phnom Penh and other cities in 24 hours, including infirm hospital patients whom family members had to push out of town in their beds, some trailing intravenous tubing and bags. In the countryside, people slaved and starved to grow rice that went to China and hauled buckets of earth to build dams without engineers or technicians.

This hideous regime finally was ousted by Vietnamese forces next door with the help of a Cambodian rebel force on January 7, 1979. Why then did it take so long before the Khmer Rouge leaders, many of them already dead or dying to be brought to justice? The answer lies in political maneuverings by the major powers, in which Cambodia became the victim of the Cold War struggle for hegemony in Southeast Asia.

In January 1979, a new government, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), was proclaimed, which soon gained control over 90 percent of the country and more of its population. However, the United States, still smarting from its defeat by Vietnam in 1975, together with China, incredibly spearheaded a resolution in the United Nations year after year to continue to accord the Khmer Rouge leaders who had carried out such horrendous crimes the right to represent Cambodia in the UN throughout the 1980s. In the field, the PRK was treated like a pariah state and denied economic aid while the Khmer Rouge camped in the jungles were given political, economic, and even military assistance. As a result, a civil war ensued between the PRK and the Khmer Rouge and its allies, newly founded resistance groups representing the royalists and an anti-communist faction, in which hundreds of thousands more Cambodians lost their lives.

In August 1979, the PRK did try the Khmer Rouge leaders in a People’s Revolutionary Tribunal and condemned its top leaders, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary to death in absentia. The West ignored this trial. Obviously the possibility of putting the Khmer Rouge on trial was not high on their agenda. U.S. and Chinese backing for the Khmer Rouge kept Cambodian politics in turmoil and prevented the pursuit of justice for the mass tragedy.

The stalemate was only broken when the Paris Peace Agreements on Cambodia were signed on October 23, 1991, and the United Nations Transitional Authority on Cambodia (UNTAC) was created and entrusted with holding elections in Cambodia. However, the solution was flawed as the agreements continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as one of the four legitimate legal entities in Cambodia. It was left to the new government of Cambodia established after the UN-sponsored elections to formally approach the United Nations on June 21, 1997, for assistance in holding a Khmer Rouge trial. The next year saw the end of the civil war with the dismantling of the remaining political and military structures of the Khmer Rouge.

In 2001 the Cambodian National Assembly passed a law to create a court to try serious crimes committed during the 1975–1979 Khmer Rouge regime. This court is called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea (Extraordinary Chambers or ECCC). An agreement with the UN was reached in June 2003 detailing how the international community will assist and participate in the Extraordinary Chambers. The ECCC is an unusual experiment in transitional justice. At one level, it marks a milestone in Cambodia’s tortured experience of violence and suffering as it will finally bring the culprits to justice. At the international level, the ECCC is the latest in a series of tribunals starting with Nuremberg and culminating with the International Criminal Court. It is a Cambodian court with international participation, a novel experiment. One thing is clear. The ECCC will have a major impact on both Cambodia and the future of international justice.

 There will be five judges, three Cambodian and two UN-appointed international judges. Four of the judges must agree, thus ensuring that at least one international judge participates in any decision, according to the so-called super-majority principle. During the past six months, local and international legal officials struggled to find ways to incorporate international law into proceedings that fall under Cambodian jurisdiction. Finally, in June 2007, they have settled their differences. The tribunal is expected to last for three years with trials starting in late 2007 or early 2008. In 2007, the only Khmer Rouge leader in jail is Kang Khech Ieu (alias Duch), the notorious director of the S21 prison and torture chamber. Senior leaders Pol Pot and Ta Mok have died while others, including Ieng Sary, who was pardoned by the king in 1996 for his death sentence at the PRK tribunal in 1979, are living in Cambodia as free citizens. Even though many Khmer Rouge leaders will not face trial, the process is important to finally bring justice, reconciliation, and peace of mind to all Cambodians who survived Khmer Rouge rule and to educate the new generations regarding Cambodia’s traumatic past.

Benny Widyono, a member of the UN transitional authority and a personal envoy to the UN secretary general, is the author of Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations (October 2007), which tells the inside story of the complex battle for Cambodia.

Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution Wins Award

Jürgen Buchenau’s Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution received the 2007 Alfred B. Thomas Award of the South Eastern Council on Latin American Studies, which is awarded annually for the best book on a Latin American subject published by a SECOLAS member in the previous year. Congratulations!