Pivot Countries

Turkey builds a parallel State in Europe through its religious organisations

First Published May 2018

Turkish increasing influence and power over the Turks and the Muslims in Europe is the single most imminent threat to European security

The European establishment is looking the other way, while the Turks are slowly increasing their foothold in Europe. the EU prefers to mock Putin rather than confront Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP. Meanwhile the Turkish state and especially its ministry of the religious affairs uses the Turkish diaspora in Europe to acquire political power on the continent. There is no separation between state and religion in Turkey. The religious organization Diyanet that operates under the Turkish ministry of religious affairs has about 2000 outposts in Europe. The Gefira team located about 1300 of them, mostly mosques. There is no other political or religious organization in Europe with leaders from outside it that has such a widespread network across the European Union, and whose ideology is alien to the native Europeans.

Diyanet in Europe.

Continue reading →

Turkish central bank dismisses chief economist and department managers

Turkey’s central bank demoted at least nine high-ranking officials including chief economist Hakan Kara, two officials said. The bank’s heads of research, banking, risk management and institutional transformation are among those who are getting new roles. This comes after Recep Tayyip Erdogan fired the governor last month for not cutting rates fast enough. Source: Reuters, Bloomberg

Turkish president vows operation in northern Syria will be ‘very soon’

Turkey’s counter-terrorism operations will move forward to a “different phase” in northern Syria soon, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Aug. 6. “We wiII move the process which we started with the Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch operations [in northern Syria] forward to a different phase very soon,” Erdoğan said at the 11th Ambassadors’ Conference. Source Hurriyet daily news

Turkey: the Game Changer

The deal between Ankara and Moscow has been signed and sealed and the first shipments of the S-400 air defence system have just landed on Turkish soil, at a military airbase located at the vicinity of the country’s capital. The second-largest NATO army is acquiring weapons and materiel from a state that by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is viewed as inimical.

Turkey occupies an area which is bridging Europe with Asia and neighbouring some of the war-ridden countries like Iraq and Syria in the volatile region known as the Middle East. It is also strategically important for NATO because it controls the Straits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and because it outflanks Russia from the south. A NATO member since 1952 Turkey – although a Third World country – wanted to remain a loyal member of the Alliance with ever closer ties to the Western world. Not only did Ankara join its troops to the NATO but also lent its territory to the pact. The reader will have remembered that it was the American missiles deployed to Turkish territory which caused anxiety at the Kremlin and induced Nikita Khrushchev to retaliate by deploying Soviet missiles to Cuba, which led to the international conflict threatening to culminate in a third world war. The strained relations between the two superpowers were only eased when both the Soviets withdrew their missiles from the largest island in the Caribic and the Americans removed theirs from Turkey.

Turkey’s membership in the Alliance has never meant that Ankara was a patsy in Washington’s hands. It skilfully guarded its sovereignty and pursued its own interests. Thus in 1974 Turkish armed forces landed in Northern Cyprus, establishing there of a separate Turkish state and a permanent – as yet – division of the island predominantly inhabited by Greeks. Thus Ankara dared to thwart the interest of another NATO member – Greece – and Athens could do nothing about it. Turkey was strategically too important and that is why it could afford to act independently of NATO’s most important allies.

Continue reading →