Turkey is a police state — so why is Britain extraditing Turkish refugees?
President Erdogan, Serbia, 2019 (Shutterstock)
Britain’s future role in the world, not to mention current foreign policy, was absent from the interactive monologues of Messrs Corbyn and Johnson this week. It wasn’t most people’s idea of a “debate”. Boris Johnson sounded like a repeated answerphone message that couldn’t be switched off. The only “global” reference came from Jeremy Corbyn when he pointed out, to unpleasant groans from the audience, that around the world the poor would suffer most from climate change. Presumably the ITV programme-makers decided that the public was not interested in anything beyond our shores, apart from our contemporary bogeyman, the European Union.
Once upon a time Britain seemed to care about “punching above its weight” in foreign affairs, a consoling form of exertion after losing an Empire. Britain still has permanent membership of the UN Security Council, even if this modest proximity to power, more often than not, means being vetoed by Russia and China. What Corbyn did not say is that climate change, and the massive population movements that will result, ought to be of interest to everyone, perhaps especially Brexiteers.
There are a number of foreign policy questions that should be commanding public attention, including our relations with Turkey. Few people are aware that British taxpayers are paying for extradition proceedings in the courts of our own country, instigated by the Turkish judiciary against Turkish refugees. Courtesy of the Home Office and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), innocent Turkish refugees spend anxious months waiting for court hearings and the opportunity to defend themselves against ludicrous accusations based on “information” from the Turkish government in support of extradition. This charade is taking place at a time when our judicial system is creaking at the seams with accused waiting up to three years from arrest to trial.
What is going on? Well, Turkey is not just historic Istanbul or booming Bodrum, discos and jolly holidays by an azure sea. After the failed military coup in 2016, Turkey has become a police state under the authoritarian rule of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Within four days of the coup President Erdogan had sacked 110 generals and admirals. Some 650 of the country’s officers were dismissed. Such swift and comprehensive action must have been prepared — the coup acting as trigger. To date, about 150,000 people, many of them police, judges, university teachers, and businessmen, have been arrested and 78,000 so far charged.
Turkey leads the world in imprisoning journalists. A once powerful, national, progressive Muslim movement, Hizmet, (Gulenists) and of course the Kurds, have borne the brunt of this repression. Extradition requests to the UK, implemented by Red Notices from the Home Office and CPS, are long-range forms of intimidation.
Britain treads carefully. In March 2016, the Turkish Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, and the EU agreed that six billion euros would be provided for the three million Syrian refugees now living within Turkey. In addition, for each Syrian refugee returned to Turkey from Greece, one refugee would be resettled in an EU country. Turkish citizens were promised visa-free access to the Schengen countries, to which Britain does not belong. That’s an aspect of foreign policy which might turn the occasional British head from Sky Sports News. After all, it was only in May 2016, just prior to the referendum, that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove authorised a Leave poster saying that a Remain vote would open the door to 76 million Turks — this at a time when Erdoğan was on the point of getting rid of Davutoğlu and abandoning negotiations to join the EU. There had never been any chance that the EU would let an unreformed Turkey into the club; accession to the EU required unanimous assent from member states — which, of course, included Britain.
Business links with Turkey are important to both economies. Bilateral trade with Turkey amounts to $20 billion annually. Erdoğan adopted the Blair/Brown public-private partnership model for infrastructural development. PPI contracts now fund major projects, such as the newly opened Istanbul airport. British companies stand to earn $2.5 billion from Erdoğan’s plans to build six new hospitals.
Erdoğan is a consummate populist leader, religiously in the Muslim Brotherhood mould, politically complex and ruthless, hated by secular urban-dwellers and adored by the rural poor of Anatolia. In her new book, Erdoğan Rising: The Battle for the Soul of Turkey, Hannah Lucinda Smith, the Turkey correspondent for the Times, describes his rise to power and how he skilfully plays contending forces off against each other. He is currently pivoting towards Russia.
Erdoğan’s ambitions lie on the Ottoman east side of the Bosphorus, in the Muslim world, where he seeks pre-eminence, while deploying economic strategies derived from the West. Like all populists, he has divided his country, in this instance between secular Kemalists (followers of Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey) and citizens committed to Islam. He became Prime Minister in 2003 and has been President since 2014. He is well past the critical ten years when power becomes an addiction for national leaders and bad things happen.
Turkey’s borders, not only with Bulgaria and the EU, but also with Georgia, Armenia, Syria, Iran and Iraq, plus its Black Sea ports giving it proximity to Russia, make it, in geopolitical terms, a pivotal country. As the historic bridge between Asia and Europe, Turkey’s future direction has been and remains of critical importance. All this would justify Britain treading carefully.
But I find it hard to believe that any right-minded person could believe that Turkish political refugees extradited from Britain on blatantly political grounds would get a fair trial in a Turkish court. And it is difficult to accept that decisions to begin extradition hearings against Turkish refugees are motivated by foreign policy considerations rather than conscientious application of the law. But if the future direction of our foreign policy is deemed to be of no importance at all in debating the selection of our next Prime Minister, we will continue to be complicit in Turkey’s violation of human rights.
