In this mailing: Burak Bekdil: Turkey: Erdoğan's War on Peace Naomi Linder Kahn: Middle East: The Ghosts of Sovereigns Past Turkey: Erdoğan's War on Peace by Burak Bekdil  •  March 11, 2021 at 5:00 am       The margin of victory [by the opposition candidate Ekrem İmamoglu in the 2019 Istanbul mayoral election] shocked Erdoğan and his party establishment. That night marked an unforgettable defeat for the invincible Erdoğan. It also marked a new, advanced phase in Islamists' war on Kurds. Erdoğan advocates more subtle ways to intimidate opposition. He has been jailing HDP's democratically elected leaders, MPs and mayors, and appointing trustees in their place. Erdoğan does not have to shut down the HDP when he has de facto crippled it. The party's two co-chairmen, Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, have been in jail since 2016. In February, the crackdown took a new ugly turn. Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a former Islamist, human rights activist and HDP MP, retweeted a post in 2016, advocating peace in the Kurdish dispute. A Turkish court sentenced him to 2½ years in jail for the retweet -- although, ironically, the original tweet source had not been indicted. In February the Supreme Court of Appeals upheld Gergerlioglu's sentence for "spreading terrorist propaganda" -- five years after the retweet. Erdogan's Kurdish problem, however, has the potential to cost him more than just Istanbul. Research found that the fertility rate in the Kurdish-speaking, eastern part of Turkey was 3.41, as opposed to an average of 2.09 in the Turkish-speaking, non-eastern areas. Kurdish votes in the presidential election year 2023 may reach seven million: Kurds could be the kingmakers. There are signs that more and more Kurds in Turkey feel disenchanted by the hawkish policy of Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A poll in February found that a quarter of Kurds who had previously voted for Erdoğan said they would not vote for him again. Erdoğan's war on peace may prove self-defeating. Pictured: Erdoğan on March 10, 2021. (Photo by Adem Altan/AFP via Getty Images) The race for the Istanbul election on March 31, 2019 went full steam ahead. Islamist parties had controlled Turkey's biggest city since 1994 – a full 25 years. Istanbul was not just another city to win for any party. Turkey's Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had put it: "Who wins Istanbul, wins Turkey." In the run-up to the 2019 election, Erdoğan realized that his Justice and Development Party (AKP) might lose if Istanbul's two million or so Kurds voted for the opposition candidate, Ekrem İmamoglu. What to do? State broadcaster TRT read a statement from Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a terrorist organization. Öcalan's letter called on Kurds to remain neutral between the government and opposition candidates. That would result in de facto support for the AKP candidate, former Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım. Continue Reading Article Middle East: The Ghosts of Sovereigns Past by Naomi Linder Kahn  •  March 11, 2021 at 4:00 am       The State of Israel continues to enforce Jordanian law [in the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria] -- despite its clearly racist and backward underpinnings. No matter what side of the political divide you view it from, a legislative and legal time-warp has trapped the residents of these territories – Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians – in amber for more than five decades. The result: legal chaos, injustice and incessant conflict. Ironically, Israel's legal reticence continues to fuel the endless conflict over the land itself... that could be avoided by simply completing the process of land survey and registration initiated by the Ottoman Empire and continued by the British Mandatory and Jordanian governments in turn. Surveying and registering land ownership was not perceived as an act of sovereignty when the British caretakers undertook it; there seems no reason why it should be regarded that way now. This same vacuum has made it impossible to formulate forward-thinking policy for land use, environmental protection, settlement policy, and perhaps most critically, a negotiated resolution of the status of the territory. Without establishing who owns what, it is impossible to proceed toward a just division of resources or a peaceful resolution of the conflict. The time has come to banish the antiquated ghosts of Ottoman, Jordanian and British Mandatory rule, and to fill the legal void in Judea and Samaria with a modern, humanist, democratic system of law for everyone. In short, the legal and legislative vacuum that has resulted from Israel's well-intentioned decision to retain Ottoman and Jordanian law in the territories that came under its legal jurisdiction over 50 years ago continues to deprive both the Arabs and Jews who live there of their basic rights. Pictured: King Hussein of Jordan visits an army post in the disputed territories known as Judea and Samaria -- or the "West Bank" (of the Jordan River), on June 5, 1967. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Now that the debate surrounding the extension of Israeli sovereignty to the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria has abated somewhat in light of the Abraham Accords, the time may be ripe to take a closer look at the legal status of these territories. The picture that emerges might be surprising. More than a century after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the empire's ghost continues to reign. More than 50 years after Israel's victory in the Six Day War, more than 30 years after King Hussein of Jordan publicly relinquished all legal and administrative ties to this territory, and more than 25 years after Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel, officially relinquishing all territorial claims, the State of Israel continues to enforce Jordanian law -- despite its clearly racist and backward underpinnings. Continue Reading Article