Word: turkeys
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That description of embryonic anarchy applies not to Iran but to its neighbor, Turkey, where the original "sick man" of 19th century politics appears to have suffered a severe relapse. Last week, a high Israeli official warned that "Turkey will fall as Iran did." Though less pessimistically, a State Department official in Washington agreed that it would be tragic for NATO if it were to lose its second biggest land army and its network of intelligence listening posts next to the Soviet Union. There are some ominous similarities between the situation in Turkey and the roots of the trouble...
...Turkey does not have the authoritarian one-man rule of a Shah as a unifying target for fragmented opposition. Modernization began earlier and was less hectic. It also produced a wider distribution of wealth and a stronger middle class than it did in Iran. Turkey's overwhelmingly Muslim population of 40 million includes 6 million Shi'ites, who are spiritual kin to those in Iran. But thanks to the secularization imposed on Turkey by its modern (1923) founder, Kemal Atatürk, religion is not nearly the force it has always been in Iran...
Despite moments of political instability that included two bloodless military coups (in 1960 and 1971), Turkey has a functioning parliamentary democracy that provides a valuable safety valve for venting popular discontent. The people can vote out a regime that they do not like. Says Orhan Kologlu, a spokesman for Premier Bulent Ecevit: "There is no need for a revolution to allow the people to express their feelings...
Nevertheless, politicians and Western observers believe that the incendiary mixture of the country's internal crisis−rampant terrorism and a near bankrupt economy−does make Turkey potentially explosive. At the least, continued economic deterioration could sorely impair Turkey's effectiveness as a NATO ally. At worst, if inflation and unemployment are not checked, the radical extremes could erode the political middle, polarize the population, and set the stage for the familiar nightmare: civil war under banners of fanatical right and left...
...Istanbul's daily Milliyet, whose unsolved murder early this month shocked the country. At the same time, sectarian clashes have broken out between Sunni Muslims, who tend to be right-wingers, and Shi'ite Muslims, who tend toward the left. Last December at Maras in central Turkey, the Sunnis went on a rampage. In retaliation for a street clash, they killed more than 100 Shi'ites and burned hundreds of others out of their homes. The massacre forced Ecevit, an accomplished poet and a prideful civil libertarian, to declare martial law in 13 of Turkey...