Word: erdogan
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Although it has long provided the base for Anglo-American missions policing the northern "no-fly" zone over Iraq, the Turkish government has little enthusiasm for a new confrontation - and the recent election victory of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party has raised concerns in Washington that Turkey may not offer strong support for a U.S. war effort. President Bush will try to change that when he meets the Turkish leader at the White House Tuesday. Erdogan's party has been portrayed as a moderate Islamist group - a characterization the party firmly rejects - and that together with traditional...
...interview with TIME's Tony Karon, Erdogan's foreign policy adviser Egemen Bagis says that Turkey will abide by any UN resolution on Iraq. And that Ankara's own priority is winning continued U.S. backing for Turkey's efforts to join the European Union...
...Though Erdogan is positioned to be the focus of power in the new government, under current laws he cannot become Prime Minister. At a rally in 1997, he read a poem: "The minarets are our bayonets. The faithful are our soldiers. God is great. God is great." For that flight of fancy, which he says was meant metaphorically, he was sentenced under laws designed to keep Islamic fundamentalism at bay. He served four months in prison and was barred for life from public office. Nonetheless, his party swept to victory, partly as a protest against Turkey's Old Guard politicians...
Born into a working-class family on Turkey's Black Sea coast, Erdogan moved at age 13 to Istanbul, where he joined the youth wing of a party founded by Necmettin Erbakan, architect of Turkey's political Islamic movement. Erbakan, who later briefly became Prime Minister, saw in the tall young soccer fanatic an ambitious orator of considerable charm...
Elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, Erdogan banned alcohol from city-owned cafes but also managed to resurrect a failing freshwater supply and clear the trash from the city's cobblestone streets. Rusen Cakir, Erdogan's biographer, stresses the politician's provincial upbringing and working-class values. "Unlike Erbakan, who was a spiritual father," he says, "Erdogan is more familiar, like a brother." Aslihan Dede, 21, a student journalist wearing a Muslim head scarf in Istanbul said last week, "He is one of us." He is also, says Cakir, a pragmatist: "He is Muslim, but he is looking...