Sovereign meltdown on the Bosphorus?

"Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who was castigated by the Kemalist establishment because he dared to question the historical whitewash of the Armenian genocide, wrote a beautiful novel, Snow, about the passions and ideological hatreds in a provincial Anatolian town. In Snow, an Islamist assassinates the principal of a Turkish college because he enforced the secular state’s ban against girls wearing headscarves. Istanbul lawyer Alparslan Arslan might well have read Pamuk’s Snow. Last week, Arslan walked into Turkey’s highest courtroom and shot five judges, declaring he was a "soldier of Allah" who sought to punish the judges who ruled against a woman teacher who wore a headscarf in violation of laws dating back to the establishment of the secular Turkish Republic by Mustafa Kemal Pasha in 1924."

"Political risk is rising dangerously fast in Turkey. Three years ago, Erdogan was hailed as a hero in the Middle East for his moderate religious agenda, for refusing to join Blair and Bush in the invasion of Iraq, for accelerating the EU accession agenda, for epic banking reforms, agreements with the IMF, for the plunge in inflation and interest rates, the resurrection of the lira from the 2001 currency meltdown, for defusing the geopolitical time bombs in Cyprus and Kurdistan, for triggering a spectacular bull market on the Istanbul Stock Exchange.

Yet Prime Minister Erdogan now faces a grim summer of discontent. Despite his parliamentary majority, his Justice and Development Party (AKP) is assailed by corruption scandals, the outbreak of secessionist Kurdish violence in Anatolia and a global emerging markets panic that eviscerated 25 per cent from the market capitalisation of the ISE. Ankara’s relationship with Washington never really recovered from Erdogan’s refusal to send Turkish troops into Iraq and his policy to engage Syria and Iran was derailed by the assassination of Rafik Hariri and the looming nuclear crisis with Teheran."

"Turkey offered the perfect synthesis between a moderate Islamist ethos and the democratic ideal. It could so easily have morphed into a Muslim version of Catholic Ireland or Chile, a parliamentary democracy where religion and freedom could coexist. If Erdogan falls, it would mean the loss of the West’s natural strategic ally in the Islamic world at a time when Iraq has degenerated into civil war and Tomahawk cruise missiles and Stealth bombers could soon streak across the skies of Iran. A world on the brink of Armageddon cannot afford yet another sanguinary "clash of civilisations"."
Khaleej Times Online - Talking Turkey: Sovereign meltdown on the Bosphorus?